Design of engineering courses as a service: Emotions, senses and implementation

Though university education is part of the service economy, there have been limited service-oriented studies on university engineering courses. Those focused largely on Kano's basic and performance needs. We used Axiomatic Design to identify two broad classes of Kano's excitement needs for engineering courses: emotional and sensory input. These needs were found to be common elements in extraordinary engineering classroom experiences. We created prototype Functional Requirements (FRs) and Design Parameters (DPs) that a course designer can use to support the insertion of these Kano excitement needs into an engineering course. We redesigned a sophomore-level open engineering course at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). The new design was implemented and evaluated in a class with 109 students. There were statistically significant improvements in the official course evaluation scores and a separate satisfaction survey. Unusual written communications were received from about 7% of the course students. The results were replicated in subsequent semesters. The use of these broad classes of excitement needs appears to meaningfully increase student satisfaction in engineering courses. We hope that the design guidance developed can also be used to insert excitement needs into emerging learning approaches such as inverted classrooms, project based learning and MOOCs.