Working together to ensure a bright future for higher education goes beyond collaborating just within the Kuali community. Kuali provides ways for clients to interact with other clients pursuing the same goals so they can collaborate with each other. It’s important to work with other institutions and even at times other industries as well.
“We share ideas, and then we turn that collaboration into innovation and then hopefully, we deliver some great product out of those dialogues,” said Steve Dowdy, University of Maryland’s Director of Research Information Systems & Integration.
Technology
makes collaboration easier, whether you’re using two-way communication and content sharing to increase engagement in the classroom, making approval processes available on a cell phone, or proposing ways to include industry in education.
In a
survey from the IBM Institute for Business Value, almost 60 percent of industry leaders and academics agreed that higher education doesn’t meet the needs of industry. In addition, 57 percent said that collaborating with partners in industries is necessary to deliver higher education to students effectively. So how do we fix that?
At San Jose State University, the school
partners with IBM to give students experience in real-world collaboration efforts. With IBMers as mentors, students learn about uses for social networking technology and how to use it in business operations for quicker innovation and more productive collaboration.
Collaboration and innovation also bring opportunities for new revenue streams through partnerships with major industry players. As we saw recently with the
competition for Amazon’s second headquarters, universities across the country pitched collaborations with the company as well as with other higher ed institutions. Dallas, which Amazon didn’t choose, proposed an Amazon U, a partnership between early childhood education, k-12 schools, a community college, and public and private universities. The idea was for Amazon U to teach students the skills that Amazon needs in employees.
Amazon chose to split its second headquarters between Long Island City, New York and Arlington, Virginia. Pace Lochte, Assistant Vice President for Economic Development at the University of Virginia,
told The Chronicle of Higher Education that its professors already are working for Amazon in short stints and then will return to the school with new understandings of the industry and company.
“You have these new firms that have almost limitless capital, vast stores of data, and an almost certain ongoing need for education and training for education and workers,” Mitchell L. Stevens, an Associate Professor of Education at Stanford University
told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “You’d be foolish, as a university or college administrator … to not bring value to those clients.
”We’ll repeat it, the next five years presents significant challenges for higher education. However, we don’t think the future is bleak. With collaboration and connectivity, institutions of higher education, communities, and industries can design and create better products and services for better-prepared students and a healthier industry.