Why are European universities not cooperating more?
The Covid-19 crisis has put universities under severe pressure. With only a few months before the beginning of the new academic year, they need to come up with effective solutions to deliver quality online education to their students. So far, universities have been operating in emergency mode. As online education had not been a priority in the past, the pandemic forced universities to find a quick fix —et voilà — the “zoom lecture” was born. But effective online education is more than a few videos and chats. Universities are now discovering that those quick fixes will not be enough in the long term.
Quality online education requires some substantive upfront investments, both in infrastructure and, more importantly, in pedagogical expertise for building engaging learning experiences. Add to that the time it takes for teachers and instructional designers to work together on course design and the thought of being able to teach fully online at high quality standards this autumn quickly becomes wishful thinking for many (if not most) universities. Looking at the situation in Europe, some universities have been slowly building their online learning capacity in the past years but this has been by no means mainstreamed. On the contrary, the differences among countries and even within the same country are substantial, and the attitudes towards online learning vary greatly. In short, before the pandemic very few institutions imagined -and even less planned for- full online instruction.
In such an unbalanced landscape and with the current time constraints, one obvious solution would be inter-university collaboration. By pooling together existing resources, both in terms of infrastructure and pedagogical support, universities can ensure their students’ access to quality online learning. This does not have to mean a unified curriculum, so the diversity of the academic offer is not endangered in any way. The main idea is to join forces on the aspects that are too resource and time intensive to be tackled independently at the moment, particularly the expertise and support for designing and delivering online courses. It sounds like a no-brainer, but unfortunately this is not the way universities operate. Collaboration is not really in their DNA, and the academic landscape has become more and more competitive in the past decades. Each university is keen to preserve its identity (and its student numbers) and would rather stress its individual character rather than see the similarities and potential cooperation with other institutions. In Europe this is combined with the variety of national education systems that often draw unnecessary barriers to collaborative endeavours. When collaboration happens, it mainly concerns research and is far less common in what educational programmes are concerned. This is also partly due to the fact that teaching is still seen as an individual activity. While informal exchanges on teaching take place, they are seldom formalised as inter-institutional programmes.
But things can also look different. Away from the spotlight, innovative e-learning initiatives have been developed around Europe for the past two decades. Some of them can provide inspiration for universities to choose a different, more effective path in the current situation. Virtuelle Hochschule Bayern (VHB)* is a network of 31 universities from Bavaria that provides its members with funding and pedagogical support for developing online courses. There are a few key aspects that make this initiative sustainable. First of all, collaboration is the default option: in order to get funding and support, each course proposal has to come from a team of at least two professors from different universities. Secondly, quality assurance plays an important role: the network provides numerous professional development opportunities on technology-enhanced learning and the courses are evaluated by a team of external experts. Last but not least, for all participating universities online learning is an integral part of the institutional strategy, carried through with the funding of support of VHB.
The result after two decades is a mature network which has developed a culture of online learning, a growing portfolio of courses accessible to students from all participating universities and a centralised support system covering all practical aspects of the course design process. For the post-covid reality, this configuration would bring about obvious advantages, by consolidating the existing “pockets” of expertise into an efficient and sustainable system. Networks like this take time to cultivate, so this is not a quick solution. But it can be a way to move forward and build a culture of cooperation and openness to online learning that will increase both the quality and the accessibility of the learning experience. A good starting point could be to develop joint introductory courses for different disciplines, as suggested by Alex Usher for the Canadian context.
While such models work well at regional and national level, there is potential for cooperation also across borders, at the European level. There are several EU-funded initiatives, such as the European Universities Initiative, that bring together universities from across the continent. European universities traditionally have many bilateral cooperation agreements. The infrastructure exists, but at the moment it is used either for research purposes or as a framework for student mobility. The next step should be to scale up and consolidate these cooperation models by adding a strong focus on online education, for instance by co-creating courses and programmes.
There are no quick fixes but there may be a shortcut. European universities have a unique chance to rise to the occasion by building on their existing networks, pooling together resources and coming up with innovative solutions for the challenges Higher Education is facing.
*I am not affiliated to this network, I researched their model as a part of a wider comparative study on online education in Europe.
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