Building Economies of Scale through Collaboration

Abstract

Representatives from three institutions will discuss their experiences in collaborating across institutional boundaries to achieve more than what could be achieved individually. Three different types of collaborative efforts will be discussed. The roadblock to interinstitutional sharing of online courses is rarely technology; more often administrative issues like student registration, grade and credit transfers, intellectual property policies, academic calendars, tuition sharing, and the like are greater obstacles. The CIC, an academic consortium of 12 large research universities in the Midwest, has committed to creating an administrative solution to interinstitutional course sharing, scheduled as a pilot in spring semester 2003.

The CIC CourseShare Web application will be overviewed, highlighting its support of the necessary information sharing between collaborating universities. Special considerations for related interinstitutional agreements among deans participating in the experimental shared courses will be discussed. The session will include examples of the Oncourse system's evolutionary transition plan for OKI conversion over the next two years through OKI partnerships and developing and leveraging those partnerships along with methods of cost savings by leveraging existing resources for support—both technically and pedagogically—the evolutionary transition plan for OKI conversion and developing and leveraging those partnerships along the way; and the LearningOnline Network with Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach (LON-CAPA) as a distributed Learning Content Management and Assessment System.