ISSN 1753-9439 Paper 10 Vol 1 No 1 Pages 240 – 275
Self-Assessment of Higher Education Degrees and Organisational learning: An exploratory study
Quality and the way through which it is managed are becoming of utmost importance in today's competitive environments. Initially, this phenomenon was mainly affecting the industrial sectors. Nevertheless, in this day and age service organisations are also influenced. In this respect, education organisations (EO) are not an exception.
Sometimes, the application of quality in EO may be spurred by an external factor. It is also the case of countries such as Costa Rica, a rich and developed Centro American country with a higher education system very influenced by the U.S.A. educational system and structures. In this context, self-assessment of higher education studies emerges as a way of improving the competitive capability of EO to face up to external pressures. Self-assessment of higher education studies allows higher EO to continuously question and improve their management practices and, as a result, the products/services they are offering. Nevertheless, if universities wish to achieve such a level of excellence it is fundamental that an organisational learning process takes place.
The main objective of this research is to analyse those factors that, a priori, may facilitate and/or hinder the process of organisational learning within a context of self-assessment of higher education degrees. In addition, we will try to identify how both processes, self-assessment and learning, are related one to each other.
We have selected one unique case (a higher education degree). The selected case is the Degree of Agronomy Engineering of the TICR (Technological Institute of Costa Rica). The analysis reveals some factors that may act both as facilitators or obstacles to the organisational learning process. Nevertheless, the decision of the organisation and continuous development of people have always appeared as enablers of the process, whereas the organisational structure has tended to slow down the organisational learning process in the studied degree. In any case, this work needs further research to be developed, both quantitative and qualitative, but it represents a first and rigorous attempt to shed a bit of light into this, up to now, unexplored research field.