Collaboration

collaborate (v.): to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary

In higher education there are many forms of collaboration. The bigger picture view is one where organizations and institutions work together to achieve a benefit for the greater good of the community. Multi-institutional collaborations have produced cost savings and led to the creation of regional consortia. Every institution has numerous examples of various departments working together collaboratively to provide better services and products to faculty and students alike. The following is a list of various resources discussing the topic of collaboration in higher education.

Related Articles

• Shared Services and Partnerships: The Keys to the Future of Higher Education, EDUCAUSE Review 46, no. 4 (July/August 2011). In Ohio, the University of Akron and Lorain County Community College are collaborating to develop successful models of operation that will benefit not only their partners in the University System of Ohio but also colleagues nationally and globally.
• Perspectives in Collaboration, EDUCAUSE Review 46, no. 2 (March/April 2011). Author Joanne Kossuth discusses the use of collaboration in a higher education environment. “A collaboration is a great opportunity for a CIO to step up and lead in support of a priority of his/her president and the presidents of the partner institutions.”
• Advisory Groups to Encourage Collaboration: A Case Study, EDUCAUSE Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2011). The State University of New York (SUNY), with more than 468,000 students across 64 campuses, found that system-wide advisory groups can serve a key leadership role when seeking broad-based consensus on large initiatives.
• From Us vs. Them to We: Collaborating for Change, EDUCAUSE Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2011). These authors found that a campus wide collaborative effort was able to produce an enterprise-scale virtualization project at Indiana University that reaped rewards.
• Innovating the 21st-Century University: It’s Time! EDUCAUSE Review 45, no. 1 (January/February 2010). If colleges and universities open up and embrace collaborative learning and collaborative knowledge production, they have a chance of surviving and even thriving in the networked, global economy of the future.

Presentations and Web Seminars

• Collaboration: A Must, or a Time-Consuming Bust?, EDUCAUSE 2009. Collaboration is touted as everything from a pathway to innovation to a financial must-do, given the current economic climate. Speaker, Joanne Kossuth, provides examples of collaboration which include joint development projects, shared connectivity, jointly appointed staff, and shared library collections and access.
• Collaboration Is Strategy, EDUCAUSE 2009 Online. Speaker, Brad Wheeler, discusses how effective collaboration has becomes an essential tool for IT leaders and leading institutions. Collaboration is more than guarded partnerships or money—it requires a cohesive vision, new attitudes, principled trust, and execution to achieve valued outcomes for institutional goals. Collaborative capabilities cannot be bought; they are developed through behavior.

Constituent and Working Groups

• The ACTI Communication, Collaboration, and Mobility (ACTI-CCM) Working Group focuses on the challenges that higher-education institutions face with respect to enterprise communication, collaboration, and mobility.
• The Library/IT Partnerships Constituent Group was formed to provide a forum for discussing management issues and sharing experiences about such partnerships and collaborative efforts.

Related Topics

• Collaborative Learning
• Collaborative Technologies
• Consortia
• IT-Library Collaboration
• Partnerships

Updated June 2012