This chapter about the systemic changes that took place at one small university during the pandemic tells the story of what happened in March 2020 and how the department was positioned to address the needs of the students. The Corona-19 virus was the event that closed schools and forced the college's remote response for teaching and communication. A short survey was issued to students about their experience. The survey yielded a positive response about the department's readiness and response to the students. Yet, when looked at holistically and systemically, another paradigm emerges that resembles the mass customization concept evolving in the manufacturing and service industries for greater than 60 years. Mass customization as a systems thinking paradigm is the theoretical frame of this chapter. The mass customization paradigm is adapted from the manufacturing industry. This paradigm addresses the decision to customize products based upon customer needs.
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On March 6, 2020, Stanford University and Touro College became the first institutions in the United States to announce transitions to completely online instruction because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Three days later, six colleges and universities in California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts followed. The next day, 78 institutions joined them. By the end of that week, just over half of all degree-granting private, non-profit, and public 4-year institutions in the country announced transitions to online learning practices. By the end of March, nearly 1,400 institutions determined online delivery of coursework for the foreseeable future (Marsicano et al., 2020). In the follow-up analysis of how higher education institutions responded, many of the theoretical frameworks focused on isomorphic applications (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Clearly much may be derived from such an application. In better understanding university responses, however, a system thinking application may add a nuanced level of insight and complement the extant isomorphic analysis. To contextualize the discussion, we will use an evaluation of one university’s response to the pandemic as a template for the application of systems thinking.
The University, under discussion for this chapter, began online instruction in March 2020 during the Corona-19 shutdown. Marsicano et al. (2020) offer a useful conceptual framework that guided much of the analysis that followed higher education’s responses. It is the neo-institutional theory of isomorphism that has a history of application to higher education departmental behavior (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). The concept advances three typologies; mimetic, coercive, and normative behaviors. Coercive isomorphism may be evident when the governors of various states required all institutions to shift to remote learning, resulting in potential mimetic behavior as higher education institutions examined how their counterparts responded. Mimetic is the common, almost identical approach institutions engaged in, even though they were each left to their own responses. Normative behavior was less observed because of the immediacy of the responses, with no organizational group present to influence the institution. Another common analytical framework was offered by Hodges et al. (2020) in their study of “emergency remote teaching.” They distinguished the strategic development of online learning and what they characterize when responding to the emergency conditions the Covid-19 pandemic produced. Often overlooked in the previous analysis is the connection of systems thinking and its impact on the various responses, particularly as they differ from the application of isomorphic applications.