|
Return to Topics
for Dissertations and Grants l
Table of Contents, Flashlight Evaluation Handbook
This dissertation (and/or grant funded
study) would analyze the history of successful and
unsuccessful efforts by institutions to collaborate in
offering a course of study (often but not necessarily always
online), identifying factors that contribute to success or
failure of such programs, and suggesting what kinds of
policies and technology platforms could increase the success
chances of such initiatives.
The potential advantages of such inter-institutional
collaboration are numerous:
- Offering a course of study that is more specialized
and/or more appropriately staffed, designed and
resourced than a single institution could manage alone
(e.g., OneMBA or a
consortium that offers courses in more foreign languages
to its member institutions' students than any one of
those institutions could offer). Being able to courses
online also increases options for attracting enough
students for a highly specialized course of study.
- enabling tiny departments to band together in order
to attract majors and grants (e.g., The
Texas
Electronic Consortium for Physics)
- using one or two leading faculty from each of
several different institutions to offer a shared program
to all their students
- attracting a more heterogeneous groups of students
than a single small college can sometimes provide by
itself, and using that diversity of students to
strengthen the class. For example, in Cultura, a US
institution teaching French collaborates with a French
institution whose students are learning about US
institutions.
- Supporting a team approach to instruction with
faculty who exemplify important values or disagreements
in the discipline (e.g., teaching about race and class
by drawing a heterogeneous faculty team from two or more
institutions).
- enabling small colleges to attract and retain
students by offering a range of courses in degrees, and
a range of degrees, not possible in small colleges that
don't collaborate in this way. The Five Colleges in
Massachusetts pioneered this approach by using
cross-registration, not distance learning.
- enabling states to offer a degree program statewide
that no one institution in the state could have offered
alone. Oregon did this many years ago in nursing, at a
time when individual nursing programs were being cut
back.
Many of these motives use the ability reach people and
resources across distance in order to improve
quality, compared to what a single campus could offer by
itself. I explored this approach in
http://bit.ly/Access-Quality.
It's also worth studying the constellation of technologies
that would make improved teaching/learning easy. For
example, video cameras should enable not only faculty but
also students to easily show papers, science experiments,
and other objects to one another close up. Students ought to
be able to call up a pair of images and point to elements of
each image as they discuss contrasts between the two.
Faculty should be easily able to break students into small
groups for discussion (even if members of each group are in
different locations).
But the main barriers to successful collaboration are almost
certainly not a lack of technology. Here are just three:
- If the economic incentives encourage institutions to
break off and offer a program on their own (even if it
isn't as good qualitatively), the system will be fragile
- Several of the options I mentioned above stem from
the assumption that students can be an instructional
asset. For example, the OneMBA program on global
management creates virtual teams of students from
different countries. Both faculty and students
presumably realize that, in a program on global
management, it's an advantage to create student teams
that work across both distance and cultural barriers.
Many faculty don't see student diversity as a potential
asset.
- For many faculty, there's 'us' (or even 'me'), where
'us' are the people whose offices are on my hallway, and
'them' (which is everyone else in the world). We talked
about that in our call, in the context of faculty who
automatically assumed that a teaching technique that was
successful in a different discipline was probably not
relevant to their discipline. Many faculty and
administrators make the same NIH assumption about
practices that have been tried at a different college.
The challenge perhaps is to create models that are so
overwhelmingly and obviously successful that a cascade
effect begins, with aggressive institutions deciding to try
something like this, to avoid being left behind. So what
would such a success look like? What discipline or type of
institution? What type of gain? Being able to write an
evidence-based set of policy suggestions would be the final
goal of this study.
- Stephen C. Ehrmann, Ph.D, Dir. of the
Flashlight Program
|
