Education Infrastructure for Inter-organizational University Collaborations

Collaboration is a long and strong academic tradition. Over the years we have seen many investments in increasing collaborations, nationally and internationally, such as Erasmus +, EIT etc. Many of these attempts fall short, there are some collaborations, some development of platforms/infrastructure, but as soon as funding ends, collaboration ends. This paper makes a strong argument for a structured approach to inter-organizational university collaborations where the opportunities and challenges of different alternatives are evaluated. The paper proposes that solutions for national inter-organizational university collaborations can be designed by combining the choice of technical educational platforms with an idea for how to organize the collaborative processes. We argue that it is possible to stake out the overall approach for inter-organizational university collaborations. Learning from previous initiatives, there are three main alternatives to choose from; (1) Focus on creating organizational collaborations; (2) Focus on creating and sharing content; and (3) Focus on creating common delivery of courses. It is noteworthy to mention that these are not mutually exclusive alternatives but can and should be combined.