Some years back my institution embarked on what seemed like a radical experiment (it wasn’t that radical actually but it appeared so at the time). They wanted to create a truly multi-disciplinary module that would have three teachers, team-up, to provide a multi-disciplinary take on a wicked real- world problem. This sounded like an excellent attempt at collaborative teaching, that would, it seemed, be highly beneficial to students as they would get a “truly” multi-disciplinary” perspective. I volunteered to join the team.

The experiment failed miserably and left me rather “tainted” by the idea of multi-disciplinary  approaches and collaboration in teaching. I initially blamed it on what I felt was the difficulties around trying to teach across disciplines. I stayed away from the idea of teach teaching and preferred, as I said to my Dean, “simply to have my own class.”

But then, a couple of years ago, I was approached to consider collaborating with several others on an online module. The collaboration would involve four other professors and their classes in four different universities. I was still afraid but I was intrigued at the possibility of working with individuals in far flung places – how could we collaborate to run a class with students from different places, cultures and institutions? We had to begin with it being partially or fully online. So again I volunteered.

My experiment with the online collaborative module was sharply different from my attempt at collaborating in a face-to-face module. Th difference did not centre around the fact that one was online and the other not. It centred on the fact in the online course, the four of us truly collaborated in trying to build a learning community. We started with trying to work through our course design so that we could connect all students in the separate courses together. We collaborated in the production of instructional materials so we opted to put a syllabus together based on our individual/existing syllabi, and reworked it to accommodate the topics that we were “experts” in. We shared resources including the videos, reading materials, slides and scaffolds. We explored various online tools that would enable us and students to meet online though they were far apart. We explored various assessment modes that would encourage peer-to-peer learning among the students.

We were not successful the first time around. But we shared openly the problems and sought a solution. For example, we noticed that the timing of the group work among the students were too compressed and this made it very stressful and made it difficult for students to collaborate. We realised quickly the importance for there to be an ice breaker for students to get to know each other and to set the “rules of engagement” so that they could proceed on with their group work. The design of the group project for students also necessitated a focus on producing something that could build on the different/diverse strengths of the students, and we needed to find a way for students to realise this and contribute to the collaboration. We had to produce something that the students could collaborate on asynchronously as part of their group assignments.

Many of these factors – openness, sharing, trust – among the team of teachers had been missing in my first experiment. Then we compartmentalized the knowledge, and assumed that it was contained within the discipline, and within the “domain space” of the teacher. There was not real effort to see the process of co-creation. Neither did we sit and share to design the module from scratch.

In both experiments we had diversity of perspectives/training/disciplines in the team. But in the latter experiment we co-created a module, building on each team member’s existing body of knowledge and curating the materials into a whole. Diversity in itself did not produce anything novel for the student, and in the case of the first experiment proved to be an abject failure. In the second experiment, we chose to take that diversity and harnessed it to build a learning community.

In the end, it was not full-proof, and there were many problems that remained along the way, but it led me to see what collaborative teaching and learning can be about if done properly….