How do you foster collaboration and innovation across disciplines and regions in higher education?

I agree, but there should also be an incentive in order to engage in a collaborative initiative. Without a clear incentive for all participants a serious collaboration cannot be sustained.

While sharing a common direction for collaborative innovation is important, it's worth stopping to reflect on the purpose, beyond the purely instrumental level. The purpose of a collaborative project might depend on the viewpoint. For instance, although all collaborators might be working towards the shared goal of producing a joint academic publication, the values and intentions driving that collaboration could look very different, depending on e.g. career stage, disciplinary background, whether the collaborator is an academic or an industry or practitioner partner, etc. In my experience, this is worth discussing explicitly before and during the collaboration, since successful collaborations can meed different needs and purposes.

At LeTourneau, our president has a vision for claiming our heritage and speaks of LeTourneau as the Christian Polytechnic University. This has inspired faculty to work together. We've developed a LeTourneau Ingenuity Center, which aids students and faculty to identify and claim the IP they are creating, we have a Center for Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurial Leadership which allows the school of business to work with the engineers and scientists to develop their IP into commercial products, and we have school of theology and vocation which looks into how faith and technology interact. These and many more activities create a university that is christian and polytechnic. If you have leadership with a vision, this can happen.

Rahim writes about incentives to collaborate. I think there also has to be a discussion/recognition of the costs of collaboration. This may be attended to in the clarification of goals and purpose but with limited time and brain width, the time and effort required to collaborate cannot be ignored. Additionally, depending on context, collaboration might be more rewarded in rhetoric than in actual reward.

@Gard Jenset Thank you for sharing your perspective. In higher ed, we tend to complicate things, and I'd like to seize your comment in search of simplicity. Clear communication on "purpose" before initiation clarifies multiple perspectives for wider gain and/or finds unity of perspective for stronger gain. Collaboration is the name of the future game. Thank you for sharing your expression. Mission first, then process.

In the interest of effective communication, it is important to consider the time differences in the different regions as well as any potential language barriers. Be realistic on how to tackle these two issues from the start. This will help keep participants motivated and engaged and the process fluid.

Always good to reach out across your institution, but realize, as with most things, that nine out of ten might not work out. But then there is the tenth that does work out. You won't find that one out of ten unless you do a lot of reaching out to get it.

Consider the culture and communication differences when engaging potential partners. More diverse and complementary skills/experiences often mean potential to tackle more complex challenges. However, it will also raise the communication overhead across disciplinary backgrounds and take more work to align expectations, ways of working, etc. In my experience there's a clear tradeoff to be made.

I read that English teachers have difficulty teaching pronunciation. I assume the problem is with the IPA phonetic notation. In its place, truespel phonetics uses phonograms (spellings) of sounds that are US English based. It can be learned in minutes with proficiency in hours. I would like global comparison of teaching pronunciation using truespel via IPA.

To foster collaboration and innovation across disciplines and regions in higher education, actively identify and engage potential partners. Look beyond your immediate network to connect with experts, researchers, and institutions from diverse fields and geographical locations. Seek out conferences, workshops, and online platforms to initiate conversations and establish relationships. Collaborating with varied perspectives can spark fresh ideas and insights, enriching the collective knowledge and driving interdisciplinary innovation.

Truespel phonetics is unfunded and free, and under my guidance. The future is great. I'll need new leaders especially those in USA upgrading to "the science of reading" with truespel. https://justpaste.it/truespelfuture

I think this is clearly an excellent idea, but one fraught with issues of Your Values. As Aretha said, is all about RESPECT. We have to remove our silos, and really collaborate across disciplines, and across institutions to ever make this work. One initiative I was especially proud of work done with my former institution and community colleges. We implemented a joint enrollment process that minimized transferability across the institutions and helped us. Our faculty, worked on collaborative work, research, and other activities, that provided opportunities that neither could do alone. We were a small private, and them a state community college.

We used an interdisciplinary approach to obtain a grant for a new SEM. We brought material engineers, biologist, and chemists together to propose a variety of projects and a team-taught course in microscopy. It's worked out very well.

To promote collaboration and innovation across disciplines and regions in higher education, design and implement collaborative activities that encourage interdisciplinary engagement. Develop projects, workshops, or research initiatives that bring together experts from different fields and geographical areas. Emphasize hands-on experiences, problem-solving, and knowledge exchange. By providing platforms for cross-disciplinary interaction, you can stimulate the generation of novel ideas, solutions, and research outcomes that transcend traditional boundaries.

In my experience, it's often useful to treat the evaluation as an ongoing concern, rather than something that happens at the end. In tech jargon, more agile than waterfall planning. Or alternatively: thinking more in terms of formative than summative assessment. Collaborative projects can drift as collaborators are pulled in various directions by other project commitments as well as more "business as usual" type of commitments. By continuously measuring progress as well as engagement, there's time to steer things back on track while there's still time.

Continuously assess the effectiveness of your collaboration and innovation efforts in higher education. Gather feedback from participants, measure outcomes, and identify areas for improvement. Adapt your strategies based on insights gained to enhance interdisciplinary cooperation and creative thinking. This iterative approach ensures that your initiatives remain dynamic, relevant, and impactful in fostering collaboration and innovation across disciplines and regions.

Sharing innovative collaborative research outputs in particular can sometimes be very challenging - they risk falling between all chairs, and not reaching their intended audience. Even when e.g. a research paper is published in one particular channel, there's a risk that it only reaches parts of its intended audience, due to different practices, expectations, and channels used by different communities. When sharing the outputs, I find it useful to think in terms of complementary channels that will reach different communities or audiences.

I cannot understate the power of finding ways to showcase a project to those in other disciplines. By demonstrating how one discipline used one particular innovation or collaboration, you can help inspires other disciplines to consider how they may apply it to their own work. For example, when I started working at a university library they already had virtual reality systems for students and faculty to make use of; however, they were stored in a room, largely unadvertised. After the library makerspace helped the nursing school integrate Embodied Labs empathy training software into their curriculum, we received many requests to collaborate and explore how VR could be used in various departments and disciplines across the university.

In our doctoral program, we are encouraging our students to share their dissertation in practice research. Our students are practitioners. Sharing the research with people in the field is important. As described in the prompt, there are many different modalities available to share and collaborate around the research. Different modalities available include podcasts, presentations, webinars, and writing and publishing articles. Public scholarship brings research and scholarly work to a broader audience, making it accessible and relevant. Public scholarship promotes knowledge sharing, empowers individuals, fosters informed discussions, builds trust, and inspires pursuit of knowledge. This may lead to more collaboration and innovation.

Share and disseminate the outcomes of your collaborative and innovative efforts across disciplines and regions in higher education. Communicate successes, lessons learned, and best practices through publications, presentations, workshops, and online platforms. By sharing your experiences, you contribute to a culture of knowledge exchange, inspire others to engage in similar initiatives, and foster a global community focused on collaboration and innovation in higher education.

Compartir tus actividades, resultados e impactos a través de diversos canales y formatos, como publicaciones, presentaciones y redes sociales, es vital para aumentar la conciencia y el reconocimiento de tu colaboración e innovación. Al comunicar tus logros a diferentes audiencias, como tu institución o el público en general, inspiras e influyes en otros y creas nuevas oportunidades de colaboración. Es fundamental reconocer las contribuciones de los socios y colaboradores, utilizando canales complementarios para llegar a diferentes comunidades. Este enfoque promueve el intercambio de conocimientos y fomenta una cultura de colaboración e innovación en la educación superior, inspirando a otras disciplinas a aplicar estas ideas en su trabajo.

The premise of the article is collaboration across regions and disciplines in higher education. However, it can often be equally valuable to extend to collaborations with industry, professional practitioners, and others. In some disciplines, this is often done as a matter of course, whereas in others it's less common, and that in itself is something to bear in mind, and explore, when setting up collaborations. In my experience, it can be very valuable.

It can be fun to give old programs a new flavor. For example, at LeTourneau Universitywe have a prelaw program that has traditionally focused stu've aldents onto English, history, and political science majors. However, more recently, with our new theme as the Christian Polytechnic University, we can give the prelaw program a technology flavor. We've done this by teaching a course in patent law. Only engineers and scientists can sit the USPTO patent bar exam and we have a lot of engineering and science students at our university. We've also added history courses that focus on technology. These changes have allowed us to give the prelaw program a technology flavor that might not be found elsewhere.