Toolkit Framework - Why Collaborate?
The Curriculum Commons Steering Committee identified several reasons, or driving factors, that lead to collaboration:
- Improves student portability
- Enhances laddering opportunities
- Strengthens transferability of credits
- Encourages shared expertise
- Provides venue to connect and network with colleagues at other institutions
- Promotes dialogue
- Enables sharing of workload responsibilities
- Provides mechanism for evergreening the curriculum
Collaboration is often driven out of necessity. In this context, institutions may collaborate out of compliance with policy or funding that is imposed. This may occur in conjunction with an economic downturn where operating, development, and capital infrastructure resources are limited. In this case, institutions begin to look for innovative ways of achieving efficiencies (maximize their input/output ratio).
However, there are other answers to the question, why collaborate? Collaboration is a better, more positive alternative because it strengthens quality curriculum development and evergreening across the post-secondary system. Quality curriculum that is delivered by quality professors is “good news” for students!
Leaders at all levels of the post-secondary system need to address some key questions when considering curriculum collaboration:
- Why are we doing this? Is this a necessity?
- Are we driven by resource limitations?
- Do we have mutual objectives? What are they?
- Will our model be more efficient? How will we know?
- Will the model help us to deal with uncertainty? Promote stability?
- How will the model influence our reputation, prestige, and image?
There are curriculum collaboration issues—reoccurring themes that may constrain curriculum collaboration—at all levels of the post-secondary system. The focus of this project is at the school, program, and faculty levels.
Schools exist within institutions to offer programs to students. Programs normally consist of courses. Courses are made up of curriculum materials such as course outlines, program/course learning outcomes, and learner assessment processes. Faculty members develop more detailed instructional materials such as learning resources, learning guides, test banks, and modules.