Developing higher education institutions' performance in the light of organizational learning as an input and total quality management

Abstract

Abstract

All over the world,  profound and continuous reforms in higher education system are taking place to keep pace with the technical development and guide objectives to adapt to social, educational and economic changes resulting from this development. Investment in higher education is an economic dimension to drive growth as well as to respond to the growing demand for admission to education Higher institutions. These institutions are in a constant search for excellence in performance in the era of the abundance of information and technical changes.

Improving the performance of educational institutions was met with intense interest represented in a number of conferences and seminars to exchange experiences and to set recommendations, which emphasizes the concept of heading towards excellence.

On other hand, higher education institutions face significant challenges of increasing growth in the number of enrolled students in those institutions beyond their capacity, resulting in a low quality of educational outcomes and the return of that on  the alignment with market needs, and fulfilling development requirements. Topics like low expenditure, huge students numbers, the absence of the least acceptable levels of infrastructure of laboratories, absence of scientific hierarchies to renew and improve higher education,   lack of self-evaluation culture, and absence of effective evaluation, all that together is a multi-faceted challenge that made the least developed countries suffer  a lot from technical retardation and unemployment.  These countries are trying to bridge the gap between them and the most developed ones, and as a result of reform attempts, the concept of education quality arose and disseminated.  Education quality started to have its own bodies in an indication to its importance and peculiarity.  

This paper presents a vision to integrate and adopt concepts of organizational learning and total quality management in one executive year plan because of the similarities between the two, as well as using each one's strengths to set firm regulations towards developing the performance of higher education institutions, following the Excellence Model that was issued by the European Foundation of Quality Management  (EFQM), considering it as a method through which requirements of organizational learning and total quality management can be fulfilled, so that efforts would not stop with achieving an excellent level, but would continue to keep and improve that level.