Collaboration & Networking a Key to Sustainable Development

10thUNESCO–APEID International Conference - Learning together forTomorrow: Education for Sustainable development, Bangkok, Thailand, Dec 6-9, 2006

Collaboration & Networking – a key to sustainable development

Dr.Vijaya Deshmukh, Registrar, NID, India

Abstract

Academic Institutions need to abandon long-established traditions of academic isolation and become active contributors to sustainable development through innovative teaching, research and outreach. Collaborative strategies should be explored as a means to keep pace with accelerated advancement and resource sharing. Inter-institutional alliances offer a means to capitalize on individual institutional strengths and to reduce costs reflected in the duplication of efforts.It is pertinent to build innovative platforms to share information and experiences and to promote dialogue among stakeholders through partnership for sustainable development.A commitment to computer-based collaboration and networking strategies should be a priority.

This paper outlinesthe necessity of networking and alliances of similar educational institutions to re-orienteducation towards sustainable development, designing integrated curricula, quality education anddelivery ofeffective programs.It highlights the factors for building sustainable collaborations for innovative education. The paper acknowledges the initiatives of some organizations in this regard.

The discussion involves broadly on requirement of innovative leadership and institutional reforms involving stakeholders of education, including the educators, researchers, students, parents, employers, social activists, media and government, to help formulate educational policy and programs. It emphasizes that networking and strategic planning in education are essential for sustainable development and capacity building in problem-based research and learning.

Keywords - Networking, Collaboration, Resource Sharing, Innovation, Sustainable Development

Introduction

In democratic countries the science of associations is the mother science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made - Alexis De Tocqueville

Collaboration is the process by which organizations work together formally for a desired purpose. It is also described as a “journey” used to define shortest and safest routes in reaching specific outcomes. “Starting or sustaining a collaborative journey is exciting, sometimes stressful, and even new for many organizations,” as per UNDESD Report. It is critical that the members share the vision and purpose. This brings institutions together to focus on achieving a mission. It is critical to move from problem driven to vision driven, from muddled roles and responsibilities to defined relationships, and from activity driven to outcome focused. But this offers greater potential for maximizing resources, creating sustainable outcomes and commitment.

Sustainable development is defined as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” In short, it implies designing strategies optimizing the combined 'development' of the ecology, the economy and of the social and cultural structures, for now and for the future, for people all over the world.Education for Sustainable Developmentis “a dynamic and expansiveundertaking that envisions a world where every person has the chance tobenefit from educational opportunities and to learn the lifestyles, behavioursand values necessary to create a sustainable future,” as stated in UNDESD brochure. ESD is for everyone, atall stages of life and in all possible learning contexts. ESD engages multiplesectors and stakeholders – including media agencies and the private sector - and utilizes all forms and methods of public awareness-raising, educationand training to promote a broad understanding of sustainable development.ESD equally addresses all three pillars of sustainable development, Society, Environment, and Economy. Culture, too, is an essential underlying dimension.”The UNESCO is playing a significant role in articulation of sustainable development in the field of education.

This paper outlines the necessity of networking and alliances of similar educational institutions to re-orient education towards sustainable development, designing integrated curricula, quality education and delivery of effective programs. It highlights the factors for building sustainable collaborations for innovative education. The paper acknowledges the initiatives of some organizations in this regard. The discussion involves broadly on requirement of innovative leadership and institutional reforms involving stakeholders of education.

Significance of collaboration & networking

As the traditional funding to educational institutions is shrinking, organizations are recognizing addressing common issues jointly so as to comply to the emerging challenges to education in the 21st century. Collaborations reduce duplication of cost and effort.

Building relationships is fundamental to the success of collaborations. Effective collaborations are characterized by building and sustaining win-win relationships where expectations are clear and understood by all. Defining relationships assists in identifying tasks, roles, responsibilities, and work plans and ultimately reaching desired outcomes. The goal of collaboration is to bring educators, students and the stakeholders together in an atmosphere of support to systematically solve existing and emerging problems in deciphering education.

Networking among the various institutions for the purpose of exchange of informationand experiences promotes education for the benefit of society and understanding. Networks play a significant role to promote the exchange of research and experiences. This exchange helps develop and understand cultural diversity, which in turn promotes international understanding. Networks are crucial for supporting the sharing of experiences, resources, theory and inspiration amongst educators. New information technologies can play an essential role in forwarding capacity-building among professionals.

Effective collaboration is characterized by win-winsituation. Collaborating partners create flexible working environments where and all are involved in the process of improving the outcome. Collaborations solve problems and seize opportunities. Collaboration is dynamic and ever changing as it moves the society forward. Understanding the complexities of collaboration and networking and applying the key elements involved increases the likelihood of achieving shared goals and outcomes. The object is to create a global virtual network for educators and students.Recognizing and strengthening the interrelatedness of relationship contributes to the "infrastructure" of the collaboration.

Building sustainable collaborations

Collaboration benefits everyone. It promotes opportunity for all to understand each other andmake significant contributions; belief in desire to produce the best possible; recognize talents, experience, and contributions of everyone. It begins with the process of defining its vision, mission, values, principles and outcomes within the context of the attitudes, norms, beliefs and values of thelarger community. Efforts begin to build teamwork and mobilize resources to build on the positive environment within community, overcome potential barriers and begin to mobilize the citizenry to institute change.Commitment is working to attain specific goals and benchmarks and to enhance the collaboration.

Leadershipqualities include personal commitment, involvement and determination to achieve the goals for development and collaboration. To build trust, all are required to present their intentions honestly. They must nurture the diversity of the collaboration as strength. Leaders understand and develop interconnecting systems for clear communication, trust building and the sharing of human and fiscal resources. Leadership that respects the value of each partner, and the degree to which organizations can be

flexible, and recognizes that some activities will be dropped in order to collaborate, is incredibly important to successful collaborations.

Vision, commitment and leadership are required for setting goals and benchmarks; identifying roles; decidingapproach to the opportunity; time lines; resources; type of evaluation; documentation etc.Data collection is necessary for establishing benchmarks for future and outcome analysis, evaluation efforts to monitor progress related to the collaborating institutions’ goals and objectives and to make modifications where necessary. Numerous methodologies may be employed in the process including quantitative, qualitative and participatory strategies. Strategies for communicating impacts must be established.

Valuing and respecting diversity honors the uniqueness, and talents of each institution. The unique skills, capabilities and expectations need to be recognized.The Core represents the common ground of understanding that binds people together to fulfill their deepest aspirations. Together, the vision, mission, values, and principles describe why the collaboration matters and how it fits in the larger world.Outcomes are the desired conditions. They reflect success in working to reach the collaboration's vision.Focusing on defining the desired Outcomes in the initial stage of building the collaboration is more likely to increase its effectiveness and the likelihood of engaging greater participation by a wide cross section of people and groups to create the vision. Some of the group values include realigning and utilizing all resources to maximum effectiveness; defining positive courses of actions through creativity, experience and research.

Contextual factors are characteristics of the ecology / environment that are related to the effectiveness of collaboration. Ecology includes physical and structured settings of the community (resource available) and the social context (i.e. political atmosphere). The collaboration may influence these characteristics but does not have control over them.An environment where there is connectedness at all levels, a history of working together, a supportive political climate, and policies, laws and regulations that encourage cooperativeness, increases the probability of a successful collaboration. Financial or monetary resources are important. Human capital is investment of people’s time, expertise and energy into collaboration.

Having a clear direction and focus for a collaboration defines the purpose of the collaboration as what its members seek to create. Collaborations thrive on the belief that people are its most valuable resource.

Collaboration forInnovative Education

From time immemorial, there have been examples of the many benefits of collaboration. Indeed, innovations rarely occur in a vacuum. Fostering collaboration and

interconnectedness is particularly important for educational institutions, as we all have similar goals that can't be achieved without one another.Two or more organisations engaged in a common pattern of information exchange to achieve common objectives either through conventional means or through modern methods is networking The Networking has inter-related modulesto support the identification, transfer and sharing by the network participants and acquisition of such items.The organizations and institutions which can form a network are academic institutions, research institutions, agenciesand institutions of central/state governments and non-governmentalorganizations.

Network partners should identify clientele and interest and focus activities accordingly. They should be motivated to give and use information for development purpose rather than passively supplying data.Naturally it presupposes more user participation in collection of information and constant interaction between the network participants.Institutions across the country need to find ways to work collaboratively on a host of important initiatives, from technology integration to service-learning to interdisciplinary research. But when discussing organizational collaboration in higher education, it is not uncommon to find some hurdles. No matter how many good ideas emerge, they fail in the face of the history and approach to doing things. Sometimes Faculty and administrators cannot work together.

The problem is that collaborative innovations into a structure and culture that supports individual work. They represent the struggles of people who want to work collaboratively but who are locked into institutional structures and cultures that reinforce individualistic work.The bureaucratic and hierarchical administrative structures in higher education represent an institutional and academic history that goes back a hundred years and reflect norms that reach far beyond the campus borders. Because outsiders are unaware of how entrenched these norms and the structures and culture that embody them are, they often do not recognize the depth and breadth of the changes needed to work in new ways.

Networking in Education

Collaboration and Networking amongst different government and private institutions for the purpose of Student and Faculty Exchange is a common practice now days. Though student exchange is active in most of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Institutes of Management(IIMs) and other institutions in India, faculty exchange is lagging behind. A library consortium provides a way for its member to conduct business in a comparative manner in these institutions. The term Consortia has been defined as "a cooperative arrangement among group or institutions." The basic premise of consortia is that its members can collectively achieve more that what they can achieve as individual institutions. The consortium constantly monitors international developments in this area and liaise with agencies to bring the best possible consortium-based solutions to its members.

INDEST Consortium

In an effort to network all the institutions under the ministry so that they can share the digital resources, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, MHRD, Government of India, has set-up the Indian National Digital Library in Engineering Sciences and Technology (INDEST) Consortium, i.e a Consortia-based Subscription to Electronic Resources for Technical Education System in India. The Ministry provides funds required for subscription to electronic resources for 38 institutions including IISc, IITs, NITs, IIMs and a few other centrally-funded Government institutions through the consortium.

Shared subscription or consortia-based subscription to electronic resources through consortia of libraries, on the one hand, permits successful deployment and desktop access to electronic resources at highly discounted rates; on the other hand, it meets the increasing pressures of diminishing budget, increased user’s demand and rising cost of journals. Incidentally, the technology change meets with the expectations of researchers, their patience, and their willingness to accept services that are available on demand. The web-based electronic resource is an apt answer to the expectations of researchers. With this welcome change, the libraries all over the world are forming consortia of all types and at all levels with an objective to take advantage of current global network to promote

better, faster and more cost-effective ways of providing electronic information resources to the information seekers.

The library consortia, on the basis of sheer strength of numbers of institutions, offers healthy business growth opportunities to the electronic publishers and thus attracts the best possible price and terms of agreement in a win-win situation for both.The electronic resources proposed for consortia-based subscription were selected based on well-established multi-disciplinary resources with broad coverage were preferred over highly specialized sources targeted for specialists; and usage / suitability to their respective institutions.The Electronic Resources accessible are EIL Online, Science Direct and Ideal, Springer Verlag, ABI / INFORM, ACM Digital Library, ASTP*. The Bibliographic Databases accessible are COMPENDEX + and INSPEC, Web of Science, SciFinder Scholar, MathSciNet, JCCC and JGATE (Free for the first year).

JCCC – J-Gate Custom Content for Consortia, is a customized solution for accessing and sharing journal literature subscribed by all the IITs, IISc and IIMs, individually and collectively through INDEST Consortium. Joining this community of resource sharing consortium are 17 National Institutes of Technology to whom the benefits of JCCC@INDEST is extended as secondary members. It is a common gateway to access 4,500+ e-Journals from 1,028 publishers, subscribed by IITs, IISc. IIMs (15 Libraries). The journals of American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME),IEEE Electronic Library and Nature are included in JCCC@INDEST.

QUE Collaboration

Quality in Undergraduate Education, or QUE is a collaboration among twenty-one colleges and universities in four states (California, Georgia, Maryland, and Nevada). It groups regional partners together in "clusters." QUE asks faculty to draft voluntary standards and student learning outcomes in five Arts and Sciences disciplines: Biology, Chemistry, English, History, and Mathematics.

NUDL Consortium

In 1999 an international consortium proposed to work toward a Networked University DigitalLibrary (NUDL) to enhance cooperation among universities in the digital library area. Further development of NUDL, dealing with electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), physics information, and the Open Archives initiative is recommended.

Cooperation could lead to sharing of technology,making these systems inter-operate, and

supporting the use of several interesting collections by constructing a distributed environment with multiple sites. In fact, sustainable development calls for additional and different processes than those traditionally thought of in education. The quest for sustainability demands new approaches to involve people, rather than convey just a body of knowledge.”

Industry-academic collaborations

Collaborations can be successful in creating and mobilizing a system wide service delivery. Success depends on the authority and commitment of agencies and the business community, and the advocacy and support of citizens. There must be the drive and power to alter existing policies, develop new policies and continue to educate and provide activities to create awareness for the community. Sustained system wide services are acknowledged through formal agreements and interdependent relationships within the community and with regional, state national and international organizations.

Businesses may provide institutions with financial support and materials or with consultants and professional trainers in decisionmaking, planning, and teamwork. Such partnerships often increase understanding between the business community and the educational institutions, resulting in greater support for the academia.

Collaborative partnerships should build upon in addressing the needs of students. They should include parents, community organizations, businesses, universities, educational institutions, and so forth. Indeed, involving parents as leaders - as tutors, program coordinators, volunteers, and community liaison - is essential to building a climate of nurturing and engaged learning.

In the changed economic environment, creating synergetic partnerships between industry and technical education institutions has become a vital necessity for improving quality and cost-competitiveness. Institutions need to constantly upgrade their course