Collaborating and Outsourcing - Taking the Lead: Strategic Management for e-Learning
A Theme from Strategic Management for e-Learning, part of the Taking the Lead: Strategic Management for e-Learning excutive summary.
A Theme from Strategic Management for e-Learning
e-Learning, more than many other teaching modes, lends itself to collaboration with other institutions or outsourcing to contracted service providers. Senior executives need to consider their options for either collaborating or outsourcing various aspects of their e-learning activities.
The full report canvasses a number of reasons why an institution might collaborate with another entity to support its e-learning activities. These include:
- to gain access to specialist expertise, knowledge, systems, courseware, networks or hardware
- to expand the visibility and market reach of an institution’s teaching programme
- to take advantage of the regional footprint and support services of an institution in another region;
- to achieve economies of scale by increasing the size of the student market and the institutions’ combined capacity to meet this market; and
- to comply with an external policy, regulatory or funding requirement for such collaboration.
The choice is usually between collaborating or outsourcing a set of services or developing them inhouse. Collaboration or outsourcing may enable an institution to make an earlier commitment to a new service; it should allow them to plan and control their costs more reliably; and it may allow them to buy in services that lie outside their ‘core business.’ The downsides of such relationships may include a loss of direct control over the processes; a disinclination to develop these services in-house; some alienation from the contracted services and the service provider; and the high cost of managing such relationships. Nevertheless, institutional leaders are well advised to view the opportunities for collaboration and outsourcing on a case-by-case basis rather than decide one way or the other by principle alone.
The following case studies are examples of what can be achieved by collaborating and outsourcing. TANZ (Tertiary Accord of New Zealand) is a collaboration among six medium-sized regional polytechnics. Right from the outset, TANZ members have seen greatest scope for collaboration in the planning, development and provision of e-learning programmes and services. Early success has been achieved in offering joint programmes in applied business. Plans are underway for larger-scale collaborative offerings.
For a number of years, Wintec has contracted Intuto to deliver a range of e-learning services and products. The relationship has allowed Wintec to take advantage of a market opening that it would have been unable to service on its own. It is a commercial relationship that undergoes constant change as the nature of the service mix changes.