Committing to Learning and Teaching

In this chapter we show in detail the ramifications of the effort chain problem and explain why pre-contextual universities that employ this approach to learning and teaching are unable to produce transformational change . We describe how a lack of understanding of context and professional control (Bowker and Star 2000) severely inhibits the capacity of those pre-contextual universities to plan for and produce whole-of-organization improvement in learning and teaching. We attribute this problem to a mismatch between aspiration, organizational design, and agency . The chapter employs simple rules (Waldrop 1992) or commitments as a central principle of the self-organizing university (SOU) derived from complex systems theory, to show how universities can begin a change process in a different way by developing the core commitments that serve as the foundation for a systemic approach to learning and teaching. Crowdsourcing (Howe 2006) and Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) (Benkler 2002) are described as self-organizing methods for understanding the learning and teaching context, developing commitments and policy in the first phase of designing an SOU.