Thursday, May 17, 2007
Education. Who are its customers? What are its products? That was a topic that was thrashed out during one of my tutorials, and the answers were quite interesting. First thought would be that we (students) are the customers, and the product is the degree we get. But do we (students) pay for our education to qualify as customers? So it has to be our parents then. They pay for our fees. But do they enjoy the benefits of the degree?
It was suggested that probably the businesses with a stake in the university were its customers because they would enjoy the benefits the graduates had to offer after they graduate, by way of generating revenue for the business, hopefully. It sounds like a logical argument, and a new perspective. Probably also explains why parents like to leave their child's education to the school.
Today I received an e-mail from my econs lecturer apologising, that's right, apologising because my assignment was not marked and returned to me on time. I don't know if you have had lots of experience in this, but it was new to me. I mean, I've had teachers apologise for being late for class, for making errors in the question paper, for recording marks wrongly. But to apologise not being able to mark in time? I'm sure that it is something most teachers, if not all, struggle with after the exam period, and more often than not you would hear things like, " There are thousand of you and only one of me." or "I only have three days to mark the cohorts papers", or my favorite, "The marking is taking awhile because I want to make sure the marking is fair."
If you're late, you're late. And here, the lecturers and tutors recognise that. They don't give an excuse why they're late, because they know that we (students) don't care. Is it my concern that there are a thousand papers to mark? You should have thought about that when you signed up for the job. So whats so special about this apology? It was so professionally written up, yet so simple, that it felt like something you would get from a customer service centre like a Singtel service centre. The level of professionalism is something that the Singapore teaching sphere can only have on their ethos, and never achieve.
Dan
12:15 am
