Exploring organisational learning in universities’ responses to a quality assurance reform: experiences from Ontario, Canada

Abstract

Amidst the international movement toward establishing more rigorous external quality assurance, the recent quality assurance reform within the Ontario public university sector involves a shift of focus from external to internal quality assurance. This paper explores to what extent organisational learning was occurring at three comprehensive Ontario universities while they managed institutional change for assuring the quality of graduate programmes in response to the system-wide quality assurance reform. Drawing upon Senge’s framework for building a learning organisation, the study found that certain levels of organisational learning were taking place, albeit to different extent and in different pace, at the three Ontario universities during the initial years of transition. The findings also illustrate that institutional change and organisational learning are inextricably linked and that organisational learning is occurring as a result of the interactions between the organisational domain of action and the individual domain of learning.

Keywords:

• External quality assurance
• institutional change
• organisational learning
• quality management
• graduate education

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Erratum

Notes

1. These universities were featured in the medical doctoral category of Maclean’s classification scheme for Canadian universities (Dwyer, 2013) and in Group 3 according to the Canadian University Survey Consortium (see its master report at http://www.cusc-ccreu.ca/new/publications.html).