Promoting institutional collaborati

Promoting institutional collaboration

Theoretical considerations and experience from various countries offer a number of models of collaborative arrangements. There is a so-called brokerage model, where an institution plays the role of a broker between those who produce and those who demand DL courses. A project management model offers another approach, where an institution develops and offers courses while local HEIs are responsible for tutoring and examinations. A third model envisages an institution to provide didactic and technical services to other member institutions, including research and advice on organisational reform. In practice, country experiences combine elements of these simplified stylised approaches including the joint offer of DL courses and joint tutoring and sharing of the research effort.
The consortium approach has been applied successfully in many countries. Two examples may be cited from Germany. The Multimedia Kontor Hamburg is a publicly financed institute to support cooperation among seven universities of the city of Hamburg, catering for around 70,000 students. The institute is a mixture of service provider and project management. Its tasks include project management, offering expertise and counselling, marketing and training.
Another example is the "Virtuelle Hochschule Bayern". The Bavarian Virtual University, is an institution founded in 2000 by all nine state universities and all 17 state universities of applied sciences in Bavaria. A further ten universities in Bavaria outside the jurisdiction of the Bavarian Ministry of Higher Education have also joined the consortium. The aim of the VHB is to complement the programmes of the traditional universities, not to replace them. With the help of the VHB, students can earn credit points in individual courses. They cannot obtain degrees, as the VHB does not offer complete courses of study. The total number of course enrolments is around 50,000. Basic financing for the University comes from public state budget with the yearly amount of 3,6 Million Euros. Some additional resources are provided by member universities .
In Brazil, co-operation between HE Institutions offering DL has been successfully attained in two programmes: Universidade do Brasil (UAB) and CEDERJ. UAB, is a publicly funded joint programme of Brazil's Ministry of Education with the State and Municipalities, with a co-operative offer by 70 public HE Institutions, now has about 100,000 students in undergraduate and graduate programmes. These HE Institutions share the 550 learning centers distributed all over Brazil and several other facilities like materials production and delivery, internet facilities, training in DL for the professors, tutors and technical staff, among others. The learning centers and the infrastructure are partially provided by the State and Municipal governments.
Centro de Educação a Distância do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (CEDERJ), is a consortium composed of six public universities, offering nine programmes for 24000 students, with 33 learning centres distributed in the State of Rio de Janeiro. The disciplines in one particular programme are shared among the universities. All the academic activities are the responsibility of the individual university, with the DL courses being offered by the same professors as the F2F ones. To support these activities a State Foundation, CECIERJ, was created with a specific budget, which produces the materials with the professors of the universities, administers the DL process, the learning centres, the platform, the F2F teaching and the DL tutorial systems.
A consortium approach has many advantages to offer. It allows the sharing of common administrative services, some basic infrastructure like server hosting and joint marketing and research, sharing of development cost and tutorial support. An additional advantage of the consortium approach is that it can help to create an online community of experts and users; it may also stimulate general reengineering of the HE institutions with regard to IT infrastructure, budgeting and reorganisation of business processes.
While there have been successes with such consortia, there also have been failed experiments. A case in point is Finland, Finish Virtual University network, which flourished for while but has become whittled down to a department in a ministry. The Finnish National Virtual University was created as a consortium participated by all the Finnish universities and the Ministry at the Department level. It failed for the same reason that some of the consortia fail, that is, the participants did not share the same strategic aims.