Institutional Partnerships and Collaborations in Online Learning

Abstract

Abstract Globally, partnerships and collaborations are increasingly common in postsecondary education. The advent of networked technologies has intensified bilateral and multilateral engagements, and in the context of learning, it reveals there are a variety of partnership and collaboration “types” that can form. This chapter presents three examples of partnership and collaboration types drawn from the academic and business literature. Four case studies of partnerships and collaborations are then presented, and the aforementioned types are applied as a best fit to a given case study. The exercise illustrates how partnerships and collaborations in postsecondary education may develop and evolve, and how they can be sustained. The partnership and collaboration types offer some structure to better understand how institutions may approach and derive benefit from engagement with other institutions centered on achieving the objectives of access, quality, and innovation, espoused by proponents of online learning.