Collaboration and Partnership: Top IT Issues, 2021

Cross-institutional partnerships and consortia exert a major influence over IT strategy at 40 percent of higher education institutions.¹ When the members of the 2020–2021 EDUCAUSE IT Issues Panel were asked how multiple institutions can collaborate or partner to make better progress on addressing each of the 2021 Top IT Issues, they were full of ideas (more than 65). Suggestions included both academic and administrative collaborations. Ideas ranged from networking for best practices to sharing solutions and services to participating in joint advocacy. Panelists viewed consortia and associations as key, trusted intermediaries. Their shared consensus was that partnerships will be a more important part of our future than they have been in the past.

Using their own words, this article summarizes panelists' hopes and advice for collaboration and partnership.

Advocacy, Policy, and Compliance

Many voices speaking together can have more impact than single institutions advocating individually. Whether pressing for aid for higher education and students or influencing the outcome of compliance legislation, higher education's policy agenda is sizeable and more consequential than ever before.

• "The size and impact of the digital divide was made clear during the pandemic. Higher education's collective influence has changed our nation for the good in seismic ways at certain pivotal points in our history. We have a strong voice with that, particularly partnering not just with other educational institutions but also with governments, with corporations, and down the line. This is a moment to advocate for resources from our country to be put in place to ensure that that problem is addressed."
• "We need to continue to collaborate on compliance issues. We should strengthen the Compliance Alliance and other organizations that are working together to try to influence new compliance regulations. If we work thoughtfully and collaboratively, we can help ensure that everybody—institutions and vendors—has to adhere to the same standards."

Vendor Advocacy

Relationships between solution providers and institutional decision-makers have matured in recent years. Decision-makers understand that technology solutions are part of the institution's core infrastructure and have the potential to reduce costs and deliver new value. The pandemic has surfaced new needs and new tensions. Institutions that collectively approach solution providers can demonstrate both the size and the solidarity of the higher education market.

• "A lot of us are using the same vendors. The more we can talk to each other about how this vendor wants us to do this or how this vendor wants us to do that, about what we're seeing and what we're experiencing and how we're responding, the better. The more methodical and organized we can be with each other about how we share this information will also help."
• "We could demand improvements to digital tools, like Canvas."
• "We should encourage everyone to use the HECVAT so we can create a very robust library. If the vendors knew that we all are relying on that HECVAT tool, they would be much more apt to contribute to it in detail. That can help us avoid acquiring solutions with features that are promised but not yet released."

Sharing Practices, Solutions, and Services

Opportunities to share practices, solutions, and services abound, if institutions are actually willing to do so. Such collaborations may start simply, with sharing best practices and learning what's worked and what hasn't. They may progress to shared resource centers for reducing duplication across institutions and increasing efficiency or to shared expertise and staffing for specialized skills or services when they are needed in less than FTE increments. Collaborative working groups to jointly develop new solutions are another example of sharing. Unfortunately, as institutions become more competitive, these kinds of collaborations may become less common, at just the time when they are most needed.

• "DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and accessibility are among the biggest challenges we're facing. Everyone has tried to come up with a plan, defining things from scratch. Both have to become assumptions guiding everything that we do. And we have to approach them as a higher ed community so that it's just a default part of being in the room, as opposed to an effort."
• "The other issue that we've had is one of accessibility. There really are not very many solutions or tools out there that meet accessibility requirements."
• "This moment has reaffirmed that we need some sort of shared security. It's not a shared CISO [Chief Information Security Officer] per se, but having a shared sort of security understanding and some issues that we can address together. I recognize that each institution has its own risk profile and its own concerns, but there might be some common things that we can take advantage of from an IT perspective."
• "Collaborating on security solutions is tricky, but we can collaborate about best practices and certainly about user education."
• "How do we actually work together to come up with good solutions for software and vendors and contract management and compliance and everything else? The fact that we have the HECVAT is great. We now have the VPAT solutions. We still don't have probably the number of items in the repository and the number of people contributing that we need. We all have to go through the software reviews, and it's just been a killer."
• "We should get a little bit more open with our spending and negotiating practices versus just being solely focused on benefiting my institution, or sometimes my department, or even worse, sometimes just myself."
• "We can combine training. The training that one institution does may not be that different from another institution's."
• "We could share diversity recruiting and pipelining efforts within geographic regions. I'd love to see people from one institution say, 'Hey, you need a developer. I just graduated 30 developers here. How can I help your organization hire one?'"
• "We're all collecting data on the same things. You can glean more insight and see trends more easily if you are able to pool in data from different geographic places."
• "We can work with other institutions that have had all-online programs for a long time to better understand their approach to student and faculty recruitment, engagement, and support."

Associations and Consortia

In the words of one panelist, Brian Coats, "You need a fruit basket of consortiums to pick from depending on the specific need." Panelists appreciated the support their consortia and associations provide for networking, best practice and solutions sharing, research and data, contract negotiations, and professional development. But people's ability to participate may be restricted because, as one panelist noted, "professional development and networking is one of the first things to go when time and money are tight."

• "The work that institutions such as EDUCAUSE and Internet2 are doing continues to grow and expand. That's because they are bringing many institutions together, whether it is in terms of shared expertise, contract negotiations, building new practices, or for that matter, advocacy in the government. The work that organizations such as EDUCAUSE are doing will allow institutions (such as ours) to continue to take advantage of them and contribute, in ways that are good not just for their institution but also higher ed in general."
• "Going to conferences like the EDUCAUSE Annual is where you really can help get alignment."
• "Collaborative successes should be better told, and told more widely. More forums should be developed that bridge academic conferences and allow for VPIT-CIO level conversations. One idea might be to riff on the EDUCAUSE Top IT Issues model and have a wide-ranging conversation between IT leaders and college/university leaders to discuss some of the above issues!"
• "This is the good of EDUCAUSE: connecting institutions to share solutions and effective practices. But I think we may have to work faster than EDUCAUSE has ever worked before. And we may have to be way more comfortable with uncertainty. It may not be an effective practice. It may be what we're doing right now. It might be a herd of guesses."
• "I'll give EDUCAUSE a plug as far as having the forum for sharing across organizations and situations internationally. It is amazing, as far as the data analytics that come up, being able to share and kind of find out what's going on. I can't tell you how many times I didn't have to do my own survey but I could just go look at the across-the-board numbers and say, "OK, students are typically bringing in three devices," for example."
• "Organizations like Achieving the Dream, where community colleges have had success moving the needle, are able to share their expertise and their results and what they used, and give practical advice to other colleges and trade schools and tribal colleges and such."
• "We should be banding together within a consortium and negotiating better deals on some of these tools that we have to buy now and for digital library resources."
• "When it comes to procurement and perhaps contract negotiations, there is strength in numbers. Our consortia's schools are not an Ohio State or a Michigan. Having those partners across the institutions can help us leverage economies of scale and so forth. It is extremely valuable for the colleges and universities of our size that don't have the scale of larger universities."
• "People love consortia of schools, such as the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, New American Colleges and Universities, or the CIC Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction [https://www.cic.edu/programs/online-humanities]. They can contact their peers and ask for help with specific problems."
• "We are part of a consortium called New York Six, and we already collaborate on many things such as contracts and contract reviews and things of that nature. Information security is actually another field where we partner. We have an ongoing arrangement with a security company that helps us with investigations, forensics, assessments, training, and things of that nature."
• "In the Big Ten, we have a very tight-knit group of CISOs who work together on a monthly, if not weekly, basis on a variety of issues."

Academic Partnerships

Today's technology leaders have a strategic perspective on their institution and higher education. They recognize that technology can effectuate sharing and delivering classes, courses, credits, and credentials across institutions. Since they know what's possible, IT leaders are ready to support institutional strategies that advance academic partnerships.

Facilitating Cross-Institutional Processes

• "We might emulate manufacturing supply chains when thinking about how to improve student transfers. For example, four-year and two-year institutions could use technology to automate and improve students' transitions and transfers."
• "Once students are set up to do remote learning at home, there is a whole world of options for online learning, and the biggest barrier to them is the amount of paperwork and complexity that's present for them to figure out. Everything from transfer articulation to applying to different places. If we as institutions could simplify these cross-institutional processes, that could help students immensely."

Sharing Learning Platforms and Resources

• "Students just want an education. Institutional leadership needs to start thinking about how it reaches across the proverbial aisles, perhaps starting within a system or consortium. Leaders should be asking, 'How are we creating better shared platforms for teaching and learning that benefit all of our students and all of our institutions?' They could offer their own online courses in partnership, not in rivalry, to help students attain more meaningful credentials more quickly."
• "We should leverage institutions that have been doing online for a long time. Instead of reinventing some key courses, we might consider how to share tuition. It would be much more cost-effective and efficient to leverage preexisting online courses than to start developing the infrastructure and support services from scratch."
• "We all may not need to be great at online learning. Whether it's in the delivery platform, or in curriculum development, or other aspects of teaching and learning, the load can be shared based on what that institution can do well."
• "We could build better OER [open educational resources]."

Sharing Programs, Courses, and Faculty

• "We should look at ways of sharing courses, not to share degrees but to manage overflow or vacant seats. We could collaborate across schools to fill up the upper-division classes, elective classes, and things like that. Because so many things are going to be online, I think that's going to be more possible now."
• "Alliances of regional schools could make classes available at other institutions to help in-state students who may not be able to or maybe shouldn't travel. That would enable those students to learn from home at a local institution in the meantime with an easy transfer. This may start with enrollment but extend beyond it and ultimately lead to a total change in how we think about what higher education, and being at an institution, is."
• "If we can plan so that we are not all trying to say, 'We're all going to launch the same program in the fall of 2020,' but instead 'Here's an academic area you could do, we'll do this area, and then we will cross-promote each other.' Or, 'Yours is the bachelor's degree and ours is the master's, and you can filter students up to ours.'"
• "We could work with other institutions to create programs to adapt better to the skills and jobs in private industry."
• "We could be sharing classes as part of a consortial strategy. Students get a degree from the institution that admitted them, but some online classes are offered through a different institution."
• "Much like the SaaS model, which commoditized some of our basic services, there have to be opportunities to commoditize introductory and foundational courses. Some institutions have already made large investments in this. How can institutions that haven't made those investments leverage those that have? How can we get to multi-institutional learning? EdX and others are doing similar things. Maybe a few institutions can collaborate on learning within as well as across courses. That in itself may become the new normal."
• "Larger institutions could partner very closely with vocational, technical schools or community colleges. As we're thinking about unemployment and financial impact, we should be thinking about not just degree opportunities but credentials and aligned skillsets that can help individuals get employed much faster."
• "Small schools have just one or two faculty teaching something like classics. Our institution hired a collaborative sabbatical replacement position. It was a three-year position that sequentially filled in for faculty sabbaticals at three institutions. That took a lot of planning, and it took a lot of trust."

Part of the needed transformation of higher education may include more substantive and widespread partnerships and collaborations. The traditional openness and cooperation of the academic community can be a competitive differentiator from for-profit organizations and other industries. Today's challenges and opportunities can be insurmountable for individual institutions. Those institutions that can transcend institutional boundaries to collaborate and advocate collectively will make more substantive progress, more quickly.

Note

1. Mark McCormack and Jamie Reeves, 2021 Higher Education Trend Watch, research report (Louisville, CO: EDUCAUSE Research, November 2020). ↩