Abstract:

For the time being, the coronavirus pandemic represents an outstanding challenge to the whole world. According to UNESCO (2020), “over 1.5 billion learners and 63 million teachers were affected by system-wide closures in 191 countries”.
In the context of digital transformation and technological innovations, the higher education institutions should be competitive and offer high-quality education.

The current landscape has brought back into question the learning organisation and organisational learning paradigms due to their potential for affecting organisational outcomes and guiding public organisations to take the challenges of an environment in a continuous transformation. And, however it is a long tradition on organisational learning and learning organisation and several instruments to collect data for determining if an organisation is a learning organisation, the lack of a unified definition and still the small amount of information about what a learning organisation looks in practice conducted to a sort of rhetoric surrounding the concept.

The need to learn from failures becomes essential in times of crises, and fundamental for public organisations that are facing with scarcity of resources and bureaucratic culture, and although they are not into a competitive environment like the ones on the market, they are under the pressure of citizens’ demands. Thus, organisational learning is affected by the organisational culture, and based on that the organisation could adapt or not faster to unexpected situations.

Nowadays, it is well known that the notion of the learning organisation is closely linked to that of organisational learning, so this paper aims to understand the learning process and its outcomes in education organisations during COVID-19. Currently, education institutions are required to learn faster in order to deal with the rapidly changing environment and to facilitate the organisational change. Therefore, now more than ever, the education organisations need to transform themselves into learning organisations.

The study takes the difference put by Schwandt & Marquardt (1999) between learning organisation and organisational learning in terms of process and product. In that view, learning organisation is “a representation of a desired end”, which in Senge’ terms is characterised through five learning disciplines, while “organisational learning is a representation of the dynamic human processes required to increase the cognitive capacity of the total organisation”. To talk about learning organisation, in the context of numerous studies on learning organisation and recognised school of thought on organisational learning means focusing on some prescribed organisational features.

In this sense, the analysis is conducted in terms of organisational learning types, and the objectives set for: a) analysing the key defining elements of the learning organisations, b) identifying the challenges of passing the educational process in online and vice versa and c) identifying the techniques used by universities to manage this change.

From methodological standpoint, the study uses mixed methods, but it is more grounded on the quantitative one, using a semi-structured questionnaire for collecting data. The sample is represented by the higher education institutions, being focused on different stakeholder perspectives. Overall, the paper provides an in-depth analysis on learning organisation, particularly within universities context.

Keywords:

Learning organisations, COVID-19 times, education.