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One sign that a profession is morphing into a discipline is when the strength inter-institutional collaborative networks rivals that of the connections within our organizations.
This is a fancy way of saying that a new group of higher ed people are starting to spend as much time and energy collaborating with people at other schools as with their own.
Collaboration across institutions has always been normal, expected, necessary, and valued in academic research. To be a professor means that your loyalty is first and foremost to your academic discipline, and only secondarily to your home institution.
Top scholars are expected to collaborate with their peers at other schools. Promotion and tenure is determined by the judgments of peers across the academy. Norms of peer review for scholarship, with peer review always understood as peers outside of one’s institution, as do deeply ingrained as to go unrecognized.
My sense is that we are seeing a similar shift towards inter-institutionality amongst some postsecondary staff.
These are staff that we having trouble naming, much less understanding Sometimes we call ourselves alt-academics. Sometimes non-faculty educators.
We are work at the margins between learning and technology, education and administration, scholarship and project management.
Most of us either have backgrounds in teaching or teach now, and all of us see ourselves as educators first - and technologists (or managers) second.
One key to understanding this emerging group - this undefined group with no good name - is the degree to which we rely on colleagues at other schools to do our jobs.
So often we are making things up as we go at our own schools that we need to check in with folks who are a bit further down the path.
How many of you have job titles that did not exist 3 years ago?
How many of you are in jobs where you are the first person at your school to hold that position?
We can work effectively with colleagues from across institutions because we share a common problem space - that of postsecondary innovation (usually involving the interaction of learning and technology - and often touching on issues of access, costs, and productivity).
We share a common language, a recognized set of methods - and a shared normative value system around the necessity of making evidence (data) driven decisions.
When future scholars of higher education look back on the open online education (MOOC) movement, they will understand this history to be as much about a vehicle for inter-institutional collaboration amongst members of an emerging academic discipline as it was about online learning at scale.
When faculty spend with each other at professional conferences or gathering in their discipline, these meetings are not thought of as professional development. Rather, they are understood for what they are - opportunities to advance the field forward through the open sharing of knowledge.
We need to make s similar shift in how we understand - and invest in - inter-institutional collaborations between non-faculty educators.
It is in the interest of everyone in higher education that we make non-incremental improvements along dimensions of quality, costs, and access. The interests of all the stakeholders, from students to payers to faculty, should be aligned around improving postsecondary productivity.
The people thinking about these issues all day long are increasingly those who work at the intersection of learning and technology. We need to embrace that our profession is evolving into a discipline, and that this any discipline will be inherently networked and inter-institutional.
Where are your closest peers?
