Redesigning for Collaboration within Higher Education Institutions: An Exploration into the Developmental Process

Abstract

As a result of both the external pressures and the known benefits of collaboration, many higher education institutions are trying to create learning communities, service and community-based learning, and interdisciplinary research and teaching. However, over 50% of collaborations fail. There has been virtually no research on how to enable higher education institutions to conduct collaborative work. This article focuses on examining how institutions moved from a culture that supports individual work to the ones that facilitate collaborative work. A three-stage model emerged. The first stage, building commitment, contains four contextual elements-values, external pressure, learning and networks. Here the institution uses ideas/information from a variety of sources to convince members of the campus of the need to conduct collaborative work. In the second stage, commitment, senior executives demonstrate support and re-examine the mission of the campus and leadership emerges within the network. The third phase is called sustaining and includes the development of structures, networks, and rewards to support the collaborations.

Training Future Actors in the Food System: A new collaborative cross-institutional, interdisciplinary training programme for students

“…The collaborations across the HEIs have not always been easy, especially as institutions and departments within them are generally not structured to support collaborative approaches to learning, research, and organisational functioning (Kezar 2005 …”

University-driven inclusive innovations in the Western Cape of South Africa: Towards a research framework of innovation regimes

“…As new knowledge and advanced skills increasingly drive economic development, universities are assumed not only to be critical sources for learning and innovation for firms in developed economies, but also for integrating the excluded and poor in innovation systems in developing country contexts (Brundenius, Lundvall, and Sutz 2009;Halme, Lindeman, and Linna 2012). A fair amount of attention has been given to related concepts such as the 'developmental university' (Kezar 2005;Brundenius, Lundvall, and Sutz 2009;Cloete, Bailey, and Pillay 2011;Makhanya 2014), engaged scholarship (Van de Ven 2006;Mathiassen and Nielsen 2008;Furco 2010), and the role of the African university in development and institutional capacity and infrastructure for knowledge utilization (Brundenius, Lundvall, and Sutz 2009;Cloete, Bailey, and Pillay 2011;Sehoole and Knight 2013) . A significant body of knowledge has emerged from the university-community partnership perspective, which considers factors such as the role and nature of partners and partnership, channels of information exchange and the role of interactive learning spaces (Kruss and Moeketsi 2005;Kruss 2006;Kruss, Adeoti, and Nabudere 2012;Petersen et al 2016).…”

Exploring the Feasibility of International Collaboration and Relationship Building through a Virtual Partnership Scheme

“…In addition to the qualitative analysis of the emails, we investigated participants' views about the partnering project itself and their beliefs about the benefits of and barriers to collaborating in this manner through an evaluation survey. We utilize Kezar's (2005) phases of collaboration commitment to describe the results of our research. The study thus offers a description of how these particular participants experienced international collaboration, and serves as an example of how academics might engage with SoTL in different international settings.…”

“…Collaboration has the potential to result in synergy, in the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, by bringing together diverse groups of people with different expertise, knowledge and skills. Studies of collaboration in organizations describe collaborative processes as interactive, where individuals develop shared norms, structures and rules (Kezar, 2005). In addition, Kezar (2005) describes how collaboration occurs in three primary stages: building commitment, commitment, and sustaining commitment.…”