“In higher education, the logic of e-collaboration is unassailable — there really are intellectual as well as fiscal economies of scale — but the institutional realities are often parochial.
Few colleges, and few professors, believe that what’s being done elsewhere is as good as what’s done at home, and collaboration looks more like a threat than an opportunity. The benefits of online instruction thoughtfully linked to classroom teaching — sometimes called technologically enabled education — are also real, but many professors prefer caricaturing computers to making any pedagogical use of them. Administrators, meanwhile, are eager to extol the possibilities of the new technologies, but leery of laying out funds for collaborative ventures that extend beyond their own campuses.
… Online instructional partnerships, and collaboration among liberal-arts colleges more generally, will thrive only where educators have ceased to think about higher education as an institutional war of all against all. As an alternative to such zero-sum logic, they’d do better to embrace the modern e-version of an older ideal: the academic commons, a community of scholars and students engaged in the ancient, endless task of seeking truth. If parochialism, fretfulness about status, and bureaucratic pettiness wind up thwarting those ventures, it will very likely be at the peril of those who oppose collaboration.”
More at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i42/42b01601.htm, but the article is available only to Chronicle subscribers.