The conversation begins with an description of a long-running successful collaboration of 13 post-secondary institutions. Students register in common course sections where institutions administer course offerings using study-abroad student exchange models. This collaboration has provided a much broader range of programming than would be possible for an individual institution.
In the late 1990s, I become involved with a province-wide collaboration of fellow business instructors who had successfully obtained provincial government funding to develop seven online business technology courses. It was an exceedingly ambitious project involving coordination and cooperation of 11 public provincial colleges and universities at a time when there was no existing model, provincial online learning policy, supporting agency or institutional educational technology specialists. Outside of one initial face-to-face onsite gathering where a preliminary concept and rough model were developed, the entire project was master-minded and sustained using Internet-based communication and forums. Matters of technology, connectivity, budget, LMS purchase and deployment, registration systems, section hosting, helpdesk, course design and content, and online teaching skills development, were proposed, discussed, adopted and fine-tuned using Internet-based communication. Less than two years after the initial gathering, the collaborative had been approved, initial funding secured, technological logistics planned and executed, registration systems developed, seven online courses produced, academic council approvals obtained and teaching agreements in place at all participating institutions.
The model for this collaborative is a shared responsibility model where students from collaborative members’ institutions register in common classrooms. Institutions agree to register and teach a balanced number of course hours similar to study-abroad student exchange models. Students are registered at their home institution but may be taught by a visiting instructor from another. At the time the proposed multi-institution collaboration was a non-traditional, perhaps radical, and complicated post-secondary education model that was difficult to explain to academic administrators, which made obtaining Education Council (Senate) approval at all 11 member institutions challenging. Institution-based project leaders were responsible for navigating institutional-level academic approvals and systems development. Support in the form of an enthusiastic, active, online community of fellow instructors was a critical component to successful creation and ongoing sustainability of this online provincial collaborative teaching and learning consortium.
The practical and physical logistics of creating this collaborative in themselves are daunting and intricate; however, when one considers the emotional, intellectual and philosophical attributes of the many people involved in this group, it becomes an intriguing study. Prior to this project, institutions viewed each other as competitors vying for students, certainly not as partners. Instructors at provincial post-secondary education institutions had very little contact with colleagues in similar disciplines outside of their home institution other than ad hoc professional development or articulation events. In addition, online courses at the time were often dismissed as being academically deficient, second-class and trendy. Technology was viewed by many as intrusive and distracting in the classroom, by others as an added burden to an already substantial workload and an ominous threat to the existence of classroom-based teachers. No one in the collaborative project group was an expert in online learning; in fact, the majority had no prior experience with or knowledge of Internet-based pedagogy. The formation of this collaborative was not initiated by a project proposal call by a department, institution or government agency.
Why did those involved with the creation and implementation of the provincial collaborative group persist? All of the people involved in the early project discussions, except those who have since retired, remain involved 15 years later. Why? During the formative and early years of the collaboration there seemingly insurmountable problems arose; all members encountered significant resistance within their respective departmental and institutional administrative processes that required dogged persistence to overcome. Why did everyone persist? A significant portion of the early project work was completed with no additional resources and on personal time. Why were people willing to spend significant amounts of personal time working on a project many others denigrated? I believe there are four factors to consider when attempting to answer these questions.
Firstly, all project members were teachers with a common personal axiology: student empowerment through knowledge. We had each witnessed first-hand how pragmatic education provided students with better employment opportunities and, consequently, better lives for themselves and their families. This belief shared by the key project founders enabled them to reach beyond the administrative boundaries of their respective institutions and imagine the benefits that might come from sharing expertise and resources.
Secondly, project members shared a vision of a more inclusive access to education. Many community colleges are responsible for post-secondary education in rural regions consisting of small scattered communities. Access to traditional place-based education was difficult or impossible for many potential students due to prohibitive travel distances or time logistics. As a result, some community colleges were experiencing low enrolments despite high student retention and success rates. Increased pressure to meet provincial education formulae for full-time equivalent (FTE) targets meant looming budget and program reductions; strong incentives to encourage faculty to look for alternate ways of providing access to education for more students via non-place-based instructional methods. The Internet provided that connectivity and accessibility.
Thirdly, most provincial post-secondary institutions were in the early stages of adopting some form of learning technology to enhance classroom-based courses. Many post-secondary business technology instructors were starting to explore these new technologies; using newly discovered connectivity tools to network more widely with like-minded colleagues around the province using online groups, attending workshops and conferences, and perhaps most importantly, witnessing how students were leveraging the Internet and educational technology to permeate the spatial boundaries of our place-bound learning environments. Were these instructors in fact, displaying strong “lead user” characteristics as described by Jeppesen and Laursen (2009)? “We also argued that lead users would be likely to perform a boundary-spanning and gate keeping role, exposing them to novel sources of valuable knowledge to their activities in the focal community” (p. 6).
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I believe it was the Internet-enabled community of practice (CoP) that developed spontaneously amongst the founding members of this project that was the key constituent to the success and longevity of this group. The CoP arose with little planning or forethought, enabled by Internet communication tools that were first used to communicate, then to organize, and to archive the growing collection of knowledge. As Markham (2005) states, “Computer mediation has a significant influence on many aspects of communication practice and theory” (p. 793). This CoP served first as a vital conduit for sharing information, a fact that Jeppesen & Laursen (2009) discovered is a hallmark of communities of practice. Over time, the stored knowledge became an important repository. “Knowledge sharing is an important aspect of innovative communities of practice and a necessary condition for the ability of communities to become innovative in the first place” (p. 6).
The preceding factors serendipitously precipitated a very powerful CoP that became a sustaining factor of this venture. Even though this community of practice germinated spontaneously and grew with little tending, in retrospect I realize it engendered many CoP extrinsic and intrinsic reward features such as reciprocity, knowledge self-efficacy, enjoyment from helping others and extraordinary levels of trust, given the history, culture and paucity of sustained collaboration within this sector. (Kankanhalli, et al., 2005; Jeppesen & Laursen, 2009; and Markham, 2005). Mayer et al. (1995) citing Gambetta 1988 maintain that trust is “a fundamental ingredient or lubricant, an unavoidable dimension of social interaction” (p.709). Davenport and Prusak (2000) postulate that “Without trust, knowledge initiatives will fail, regardless of how thoroughly they are supported by technology and rhetoric and even if the survival of the organization depends on effective knowledge transfer” (p. 34).