Designing Effective Inter-Institutional Collaborations for a Post-Pandemic World

Many scholars have emphasized the profound continuing disruption of global higher learning by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our experiences of designing and leading two collaborative projects during the pandemic exposed us to some of the challenges and opportunities that our sector faces as we envision a post-pandemic world. These projects led us to reflect on the conditions that promote or preclude the success of such efforts, and our recommendations in this chapter flow from that experience. Our first question was how best to design collaborative inter-institutional higher education projects for remote learning and its enabling technologies in a climate where positive narratives may nullify the positive power of communities of practice by breeding cynicism, cultural dissonance, and conflict. Deep organizational barriers also hinder large-scale collaborative approaches. To succeed, our public universities need to confront and overcome these structural and cultural obstacles, and we have reframed existing disincentives in terms of potential incentives.