So this is really neat. I’m on the phone here with some American Association of State Colleges and Universities people on a conference call, and we’re hammering out how multiple state colleges and universities can best work together to build fully articulated blended and fully online courses that we share with one another.

The basic (proposed) organizational structure looks to be to nominate an e-course national coordinator and a scholar chair to work together to produce a course with a committee of scholars managed by the scholar chair. Students would buy into the course as if it were a textbook at a nominal fee that would be pumped back into a course account.

This would allow the funding of a 501(c)(3) general services unit which could be used run analytics on the data and coordinate the iterative improvement stuff based on that data. [There’s a bit of a sticky wicket there technology-wise, but let’s leave that aside for a minute].

 It’s not open, certainly, but it’s a massive step towards seizing control of our own destiny as institutions and realizing if we are survive we are only going to do it through collaborating and promoting inter-institutional reuse.