Benefits of Collaboration

Vicky Getis and I traveled 600 miles (past nearly 560 miles of corn fields) in a single-windshield-wiper sized car (Yaris) to get to UIUC and back for our one-day Committee on Institutional Collaboration (CIC) Learning Technology Liaisons meeting. It was a beautiful day in Urbana: mid 70s, the last of the bright gold leaves drifting lazily down on the green grass. Since it was Monday morning, students were sparse and the campus looked amazing…but I digress.

Beautifully radiant leaves were evident throughout U of Illinois during the CIC LT Liaisons meeting. Unfortunately, we were in a building basement for 8 hours.

The CIC LT Liaisons group helps bring together folks from peer institutions to talk about successes and opportunities for collaboration. The meeting docket included reports from the various institutions, a presentation from an U of Illinois professor discussing his experience teaching a MOOC on sustainability, and a discussion about future projects around eTexts (or, affordable textbook initiatives) and learning analytics.

The 19 in attendance shared some really amazing initiatives like eTexts@Illinois (Illinois), Next@IU and IU Online (Indiana), CourseLoad (Iowa), MOOCs and LMS integrations (Michigan), SCALE-UP classrooms (Michigan State), a local hype cycle view (Minnesota), learning analytics (Nebraska), advisory structures (Northwestern), Digital First and Grants (Ohio State), badges (Penn State), active learning spaces/IMPACT (Purdue), and situated learning (Wisconsin).

The meeting was beneficial because we learned about initiatives at other institutions and our colleagues’ willingness to share their experiences will help us prevent missteps and unnecessary duplication.

Although the conversations were packed into an 8 hour day, I’m excited to continue these conversations over our listserv as we think about our current and future initiatives at Ohio State.