Organizational learning in higher education: exploring one institution's efforts to meet the emerging changes in the higher education landscape.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20316535

The purpose of this single, descriptive case study was to gain new insight into how members of a successful higher education institution - Virtual U - are learning to adapt to the dynamic and ever-changing environment. This study examined one successful institution of higher education that has experienced exponential financial and student growth in a time where other colleges and universities are struggling to survive. This institution began as a small brick and mortar institution in the northeast that was faced with fears of its own mortality and has since become one of the largest providers of online education in the United States serving more than 130,000 students. The over-arching research question sought to understand how organizational members describe their organizational learning system. The findings revealed that Virtual U's dynamic social system reflects a relative balance of learning and performance actions. Findings revealed evidence of learning actions in terms of how Virtual U is seeking to anticipate future market needs, Virtual U is being intentional to reflect on their organizational goals, Virtual U has designed a structure to enable effective knowledge sharing practices, and Virtual U's learning culture supports development of its employees toward institutional goals. This relative balance of performance and learning is consistent with the Organizational Learning Systems Theory (Schwandt, 1994, 1997). The premise of this theory is that organizations as social systems have the inherent capacity for performance and learning; and that the four subsystems of actions are functional prerequisites for the system to adapt to their environment. Virtual U's findings reveal that their organizational members articulated both learning actions and performance actions for their system, although the focus on this dissertation was on the learning system. Organizational Learning offers a promising framework for how higher education administration might understand the strategies, structures, and processes within their system that enable or inhibit the ability of the organization to create new knowledge and adapt to the changing conditions. Keywords: higher education, organizational learning, environmental change, adaptive learning, culture of learning, organizational learning model, organizational performance, Schwandt Organizational Learning Model.