The COVID-19 pandemic required quick responses from the organizations, making it necessary for them to reinvent and rethink themselves. This reality was also evident in the higher education context, where the institutions had the need to assure the continuity of their activities remotely, without compromising the quality of the provided services (the educational and the support ones). This was a major challenge for the institutions' quality management systems (QMS), unusually designed to respond to rapid changes, especially in what concerns to an effective response to the students' needs. In the case of the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, the institutional response resulted from an action plan based on two major principles—the use of the existing quality's structure/instruments and its integrated reflection—in order to find improvement inputs to the system's performance. The results evinced a globally positive response but also the need to adjust the QMS to better serve the academic community's needs, particularly those of students.
TopIntroduction
The COVID 19 pandemic, experienced worldwide, required organizations to respond quickly and effectively to a radically different context. Facing a totally unknown reality, the organizations had the need to reinvent themselves, as well as their practices, giving more adjusted responses to the new challenges brought about by the pandemic. Thus, mobilizing their internal abilities for change and innovation, the organizations provided answers, in which their effectiveness depended on the level of development of their internal competences.
This situation was also evident in educational institutions, namely in Higher Education, where the need to provide an effective response to students’ needs − so that they could continue their studies and, at the same time, ensure administrative responses − became urgent. This situation implied that Higher Education Institutions (HEI) had to mobilize, in a short period of time, a set of material, technological and human resources that would allow a rapid paradigm shift, in order to enable Distance Learning (DL) throughout all its training offer. A reality that put under pressure the entire functioning of the HEI. If, on the one hand, it was inevitable to continue its operation, on the other hand, the ability to maintain the levels of quality in its processes proved to be an enormous challenge. In particular for the HEI that were not prepared to operate exclusively on-line and for its Quality Management Systems (QMS) that normally have a strict structure, with limited capacity to respond to rapid changes and that are pretty much based in formal and bureaucratic processes.
The general perception is that, during this exceptional period, the HEI had an enormous capacity for change, definitively putting aside the idea of organizations that are stuck in time and with minor capacity to react to the society’s challenges. It also demonstrates an enormous maturity in institutions’ internal development and management and the important role played by the QMS. Taking into account the specific characteristics of Education, with high levels of flexibility, autonomy and skills of the main players, namely the teachers, it was possible to quickly adapt to the new reality, without significantly lowering the costs and, above all, with the quality standards normally required. However, not everything went well and there were several difficulties. What were (and still are) HEI’s real capacities to respond to the students’ needs, in a context that anyone were aware of? Was the process structured enough so that it did not become an informal superstructure in which the students felt lost and unprotected? And what were the mechanisms that guarantee that the evaluations maintained the levels of demand and robustness against fraud?
This article describes the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal (IPS) response to the exceptional and changing context, resulting from the pandemic, the contribution of its QMS and the transformational challenges that arise in the near future.