An Investigation of Teaching and Learning Process Efficiency in a Business School Using DEA

Assuring high-quality teaching and learning continues to be a priority for institutions of higher learning. Higher education institutions use a variety of tools to ensure the accomplishment of their initiatives, which focus primarily on student feedback. The purpose of this study is to ascertain the overall effectiveness of the teaching and learning processes across various business school courses by utilizing the most effective tool available, namely Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The data was collected from seventy sections of a wide range of courses at a business school in Saudi Arabia. Almost 1470 students’ opinions in the form of a course evaluation survey (CES) were used to calculate the efficiency score of decision-making units using DEA. The study examined four inputs and six outputs. On the Charnes Cooper and Rhodes (CCR) scale, twenty-five decision-making units (DMUs) are found to be efficient, accounting for 35.71% of the total population studied. On the Banker Charnes and Cooper (BCC) scale, this number increases to 34, nearly half of the total number of DMUs analysed. The current study establishes a model for internal benchmarking by using a generic model. Where the constantly efficient DMU could be probed to collect best practices and implement them for internal benchmarking and continuous improvement in the teaching and learning process. It proposes a model for optimizing the CES results through internal benchmarking. Following that, it discusses how these examples can be used to develop internal benchmarking systems.