I wrote a blog post, So does your institution have a silo mentality? I wrote it after reading this article on the WonkHE about higher education silos, Institutional silos are making it harder to build learning environments for student success.
Ask any higher education institution leader about the organisational challenges they’re grappling with, and they’ll start talking about silos.
Though talking about silos, the article is more about integrating digital into learning and teaching.
Though as anyone knows breaking down silos is hard. We often think of grain silos, metal cylinders that are close together, they should be easy to break, shouldn’t they? I always now think of higher education silos as missile silos, embedded into reinforced concrete and dispersed across a wide area.
Breaking down silo working, isn’t just about saying, we need to break down the silos but is so much more about thinking strategically about what your organisation is trying to achieve.
After working from home at the start of the week, I went off to London. I was attending the BLE 20th anniversary event at Senate House.
The Bloomsbury Learning Exchange (BLE) brings together expertise to share good practice and enable collaboration in digital education and technology enhanced learning projects. We are a partnership comprising six Higher Education Institutions in Bloomsbury, central London. Essentially, the BLE is the community, and the BLE Executive Team facilitates the exchange as well as offering specific services to the partner institutions.
They have grown over the years and expanded their collaboration. It is a really good example of collaboration that doesn’t mean you have to create complex pseudo-organisations to manage a shared service. The core of the BLE is the memorandum of understanding.
I ran a similar collaboration back in 2000, called the Western Colleges Consortium, where the FE colleges in Avon shared a VLE. There are lots of lessons from that experience and the BLE that higher education probably should take on board for future collaborations, especially in the learning technology space. One of the key lessons is about keeping it simple, constant adaptation and tinkering, may in the short term resolve problems, but it is harder to then collaborate whern faced with a future challenging scenario.
I have done quite a few things with the BLE over the last twenty years, including a few things while I have been at Jisc. It was nice to see and hear about their success.
At the event I had a couple of interesting conversations. One was with a manager, who spoke about the challenges in joining collaborative ventures, and needing more support from senior management. We know that collaboration often needs to come from the top, but there is also the need to delegate that downwards, to enable collaboration at different levels in the organisation as well.
In another conversation someone provided feedback on the report, which he stated he “had read thoroughly” and even quoted lines from the report. He said it was an excellent report and much needed. This was nice to hear.
Did some more work on the UUK project, did some stuff with the KPMG report next steps, and created a template for the position papers for the E in NREN activity.
