Transcript

PRESENTER:

When might it be better to collaborate? Or when might it be necessary to compete in higher education around teaching and learning? ... hear what you have to say now. When is it better to collaborate? When is it better to compete?

[LAUGHTER AND INTERPOSING VOICES]

PRESENTER:

Does none of it matter then? We just do it?

SPEAKER 1:

I think we talked about collaboration and [INAUDIBLE]. We spoke about collaboration and some of the challenges and benefits. And altruism, what does altruism mean, actually, and so on. But we never got to the competition bit.

PRESENTER:

Has anybody else got to the competition bit? Yes? Go ahead.

SPEAKER 2:

I think we didn’t really. We touched on competition, because it was kind of a why would you want to compete? I think that was the question. I can understand from an institutional perspective – get as many students as possible. But that’s not the teaching and learning thing. That’s the institutional marketing thing.

I’m not sure we ever should – should, would, do? – compete in terms of teaching and learning, unless you’re talking about raising our game. This is an opportunity to see how other people operate, and it spurs us on to do better. So in a sense, we kind of said collaborate and compete is irrelevant.

SPEAKER 3:

Are you competing, then? If your university can show that the materials that you’re producing is as good as MIT, for example, but that’s competing, though, isn’t it?

SPEAKER 2:

No, that’s ...

SPEAKER 3:

You’re putting yourself into the same spaces, then.

SPEAKER 2:

Showcasing what you do is not the same as competing. Is it?

SPEAKER 3:

I think it is. Well, I think it is. But see, if I was a student and I was looking, I did a search on a particular course. And I found yours, I found MIT, maybe. And then yours was underneath it. And it’s like MSA, oh, this is in America. Oh, what’s that one? So you’ve obviously put yourself into the same place as somehow you’re competing with them. Just by being next to them.

SPEAKER 2:

Yes, but if you see it like that then, in effect, nobody would contribute anything, because then, okay, if I can’t – sorry. If I’m not as good as MIT or Oxford, then I’m not going to bother. If you take that, you put stuff in, and if people, especially where the collaboration comes in, you can see what other people are doing. You think, well actually, maybe mine could be better. So you make it better.

I don’t see that you start off from the point of view of saying I’m going to be as good as Oxford, MIT, Rice, whatever. I think if I go in with that attitude, I’m never going to do it. So in a sense, I wouldn’t compete. It’s learning from rather than competing.

SPEAKER 1:

Something that came up when we were talking about collaboration was that what if the people, I had an example where one of the people we’re potentially collaborating with is concerned that we might actually collaborate with their competitor.

So there’s some interesting sort of dynamics that go on in terms of collaboration as well. Who you collaborate with, and at what scale you choose to collaborate.

SPEAKER 4:

Collaboration and competing might be right next to each other. If it’s right nowadays to take something that’s been produced by a high quality institution and vary it by adding in your good ideas to make it even better. And if people do that successively, it’s a bit – I’m trying to think of another analogy for that. There’s something we often do with it. Take the best possible model that we’ve seen, and then just make it that little bit better. Pass it back in, and somebody else also improves it. Unfortunately, I can’t think of what the model is.

SPEAKER 1:

Standing on the shoulders of giants.

SPEAKER 4:

There you go. Exactly. So collaboration and competing are right next to each other. To and fro.

SPEAKER 3:

This is why I find it very strange. Maybe I’m a bit cynical, but I can’t understand why Hewlett Foundation and Gates Foundation are backing things like open systems like this. It just seems sort of counter ...

SOUND RECORDIST:

Sorry. You keep waving the mike around.

SPEAKER 3:

Oh, sorry, yeah. Yeah, it just seems the opposite of the sort of normal model of things.

PRESENTER:

What would you think their normal model is?

SPEAKER 3:

Well I always thought Microsoft was always the opposite of openness, really. And Hewlett Packard was sort of the same sort of thing. [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER:

The foundations – whoever sets up – are separate from whoever it is that set them up. They have deeds of trust. So, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is set up by William Hewlett of Hewlett Packard. There’s actually a separate Hewlett Packard Foundation, just as there’s companies named Packard, there is also [? facts ?], just like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is totally separate from Microsoft.

It’s his own money set up, and in their trust deeds, which all sort of charities or foundations like that would have to have, they have their purposes. For them, their purpose is what you might call social enterprise. They do funding in education and environment, and one or two others. And they have a particular focus on the eastern part of the US.

Mainly the US, and they only do a little bit outside of the US, as it happens. What tends to happen is that as a foundation they will come in and want to think, what’s the sort of new area which we can do? We can add monies to? Perhaps which governments wouldn’t do, which other people wouldn’t do, that we can do as a philanthropic organisation.

And that would be very much driven by the people, by what sort of strategy the board sets out, but then the individual officers they’d employ. So it would be a bit like with Open Source software, the Andrew W Mellon Foundation did a lot in that. You probably didn’t know that. They funded a lot of things in the early days around that. They just saw it as social enterprise.

We’re saying we’re not expecting to get a commercial return out of it. As a foundation, we invest in the hope that there will be some greater benefits and things that come out of this. And so they just saw this as being part of it. So they’re trying to do – fund things which there might not be funding for in any other way.

This is the way other sorts of charities and things like ... Anyway, that’s a slight sort of digression. Things just carry on. And obviously collaboration and competition is one of those things, it’s two sides of the same coin. It’s difficult to separate them out very clearly. One thing which is clear, I think, as Jonathan said in terms of academia and higher education in general, it’s built on a philosophy of sharing. Sharing ideas, sharing knowledge. Unlocking knowledge, sharing knowledge. That’s what the MIT strap line was for their MIT OpenCourseWare. Because that’s part of it. It is a collective endeavour. So a lot of it is collective, and the higher education system actually works on that collective endeavour, by and large. And particularly the external examiner system. You give of your time. And there’s all those types of things. The whole education publishing system works like that.

Most people give of their time, free to run that. And there’s a lot of people questioning that. The open access publishing models, and all sorts of things like that. But it is the case, the basic premise of higher education is that collaboration. But of course both done as an individual, academic level, for departmental to a subject, to an institutional, there are elements of competition that come in there.

You’re competing with the person next door for that research grant. You’re competing with that person to get promotion. You’re competing with those people, that other institution, to get more people into your institution. Or more widening participation of students, or whatever it is. There’s always that element which there is aspects of competition. But it’s also built upon. So it’s difficult.

There is no set answer. You have to look at every circumstance on its own, and work out if you’re collaborating. Obviously all the people are collaborating, it’s for them to try and work out what is it we’re getting out of this in a collaboration. What are the downsides?

Are we putting anybody else out doing this? But that happens throughout. That happens throughout the area. It’s just part and parcel of what we do. It’s just that there’s competition in all sorts of different forms, and there’s collaboration in all sorts of forms.