Building Momentum around Possibilities and Drivers

Building momentum around shared vision, well-planned actions, collaboration and involvement of stakeholders and leaders at all levels while being innovative, flexible, open and outcome-oriented can significantly increase success of a project. Momentum can attract new partners and keep everyone engaged and energized through the process. Therefore, it is very beneficial to prepare a plan on how to build and keep momentum in an early stage of a project.



Building Momentum

Drivers for change. Universities and veterinary schools exist within political, cultural and social contexts that shape their policy and practice (Hammond, 2003). That context shapes three main drivers:
 * Economic and social development,
 * Beliefs and expectations of the role of education in our ever-changing society,
 * Development of educational technologies that have the potential to enable us to achieve these objectives.

Change. During the last 10 years, changes on the Web created significantly different context, and all three drivers were visibly influenced/strengthened. Web 2.0 technologies and Wikinomics are recognized as the main change agents. Therefore, let’s say a few words about those changes.

Web 2.0 is a framework that facilitates collaboration, user-content creation, information-sharing, user-centered design and inter-operability on the Web. With Web 2.0 tools, users can collaborate, create social networks, create or edit content and, what is very important for us, they can teach, learn and collaborate on course development. Leading Internet giants such as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia made outstanding, globally important success as a part of a Web 2.0 framework.

Wikinomics is a framework or movement that brings people together to create a common knowledge through mass collaboration. It represents as important a historical phenomenon as the birth of bureaucracy (Staley, 2009) or the Industrial Revolution. It is based on Web 2.0 technologies such as social-networking sites, blogs, wikis, and video-sharing sites. Probably the best known example of wikinomics is Wikipedia. It is a free online encyclopedia that was founded in 2001 and allows anyone to edit. It has 3.3 million articles in English (15 million all together), compared with 100,000 articles in Encyclopedia Britannica. While it has 33 times more  articles, the difference in accuracy is not particularly great. Research by  Nature (Giles, 2005) showed that, on   average, Encyclopedia Britannica has three inaccuracies per article, while   Wikipedia has four. Britannica does Wiki. Explosive development of Wikipedia has  forced Encyclopedia Britannica to accept new rules. Recently, Encyclopedia Britannica is  offering editing and adding new article options. Editors have to confirm  changes before they become public. Figure 10. Britannica.com 2.0 A win-win situation. Dr. Diane Frank (Frank, 2009), president of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (2008/2009) noted that Wikinomics principles in the veterinary community ‘would certainly be a win-win situation for those involved.’ Fast development of www.WikiVet.Net gives additional strength to her statement.

Four cornerstones of success. The main principles of Wikinomics (Tapscott, Williams, 2008) are Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally:
 * Being Open. Schools that open their doors to external ideas and human capital will outperform schools that rely solely on their internal resources and capabilities.
 *  Peering. Peering leverages self-organization. For some tasks that style is more productive than traditional hierarchical management.
 * Sharing. In a super-productive collaborative world, schools and companies have to share part of their intellectual property so they can actively collaborate and generate new intellectual property plus improve their position in the global economy.
 * Acting Globally. Winning schools have to act globally. They are globally important institutions and globalized collaboration is the only way to stay at the top.

Traditional and proven tools + Web 2.0 collaboration. Adoption of those principles has become an important prerequisite of globally significant success. In other words, universities can gain great benefit if they invigorate their traditional structures and procedures with benefits of Web 2.0. For example:
 * An active community of teachers that actively collaborate through wiki and a forum (Web 2.0, Wikinomics) can significantly ease development of classical courses (face-to-face, blended or online)
 * A peer-reviewed wiki can generate results like WikiVet.Net has.

Tools for optimal combination. Moodle 2.0 as a Learning Management System provides a well-structured and well-controlled learning environment, just like traditional universities. However, at the same time, Moodle 2.0 is designed as an integral part of the Web 2.0 framework. It is interoperable with all major Web 2.0 applications, and Moodle Community Hubs provide a powerful collaborative framework while letting each institution having absolute control over their courses and their Moodle installation. All we have to do is turn on or off features we do or do not want.

Beliefs and expectations. While economic and social factors and educational technologies are stressing that: ‘Yes, we have huge possibilities and yes we can and we should make a change’, beliefs and expectations are still at a critical point. That is why it is important to address skepticism about online education and collaboration, particularly around questions of quality, workload, and loss of control. Research done by MacKeogh and Fox (2009) concluded that the faculty of one traditional university wants to retain control over course delivery (66%) and they favor collaboration with institutions (82%), while less than one-third favor outsourcing. Their attitudes to technology supported education are variable ranging from highly supportive and experienced users to highly skeptical. That is why it will be very helpful if a well-planned and articulated (e)learning strategy is developed and promoted while all stakeholders have a chance to be actively involved in the process. Through such a process, we can mobilize supporters and convert skeptics.

Technical Support and pedagogical skills. Numerous researches stresses that faculty requires much more and much better support for educational technologies than they usually get (Bates, 2000). Furthermore, up-to-date education supported by technology requires not just technological skills but new educational skills.

Tools to build momentum. The Web 2.0 framework provides numerous tools to ease collaborative change management and improve results and satisfaction of all stakeholders. Proper selection and usage of such tools can be very important for the future of a project like this one. Forums, blogs, wikis, Facebook, constituent relationship management systems (eg. CiviCRM) are just a few of the tools we can use. Mobilizing Global Network. The global network provides significantly more options than a regional network. Niall Sclater, director of Learning Innovation at the Open University concluded (Bierhals, 2009): “It wouldn't make sense to restrict [partnerships] to the UK or Europe. You're not getting all the expertise that's around.”

Power of Global Network. If we mobilize all veterinary faculty experienced with Moodle course development, we will see that we have a huge number of experienced e-learning professionals and a significant number of interactive online courses. Just to name a few:
 * Veterinary School University of Illinois has nine online courses (http://vetmed.illinois.edu/veo/)
 * Centre for Veterinary Education (cve.edu.au) has more than 300 hours  of continuing education
 * VetScholar (vetscholar.vetspace.org.nz), an award-winning online learning program has more than 30 courses
 * Veterinary School in Glasgow has dozens of courses
 * A commercial educational provider will probably be interested if they can promote their courses through the network we are trying to build.

Results. That means that if we open our doors (benign open) while we are peering, sharing and acting globally, in no time we may have more than 100 courses, hundreds of experienced partners and enough power to make and keep momentum.

Chief Networking Officer. Of course, it will require time, planning and negotiation to include numerous partners and their courses in our network and there may be a significant number of ‘potential partners’ that do not fit into this project or cannot participate in this project. But online course providers are just the tip of the iceberg. Globally we have significantly more potential partners and many more potential courses we can include in our network. That is why it may be beneficial to add the Chief Networking Officer (CNO) position to the team. What is the CNO? The CNO connects people and businesses within the company/school, with other companies/schools, and with consumers (Wikipedia, 2010). The CNO's mission is to facilitate know-how transfer and information flow, fostering innovation, safeguarding diversity, and facilitating profit growth. More about the CNO position is available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_networking_officer. Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams. Building collaborative teams is a challenging task in any environment. That is why it is important to have a framework that provides the possibility of ‘absolute independence’ if a member institution wants. It can be a helpful tool for braking initial resistance and long-lasting success. In the long run, development of collaborative teams is an essential task. Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson wrote “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams” in the Harvard Business Review (Gratton, Erickson, 2007). They noted that:
 * Although teams that are large, virtual, diverse, and composed of highly educated specialists are increasingly crucial with challenging projects, those same four characteristics make it hard for teams to get anything done. To put it another way, the qualities required for success are the same qualities that undermine success. Members of complex teams are less likely—absent other influences—to share knowledge freely, to learn from one another, to shift workloads flexibly to break up unexpected bottlenecks, to help one another complete jobs and meet deadlines, and to share resources—in other words, to collaborate. They are less likely to say that they “sink or swim” together, want one another to succeed, or view their goals as compatible.

That is why the two proposed these strategies:
 * Investing in Signature Relationship Practices Leaders can encourage collaborative behavior if they make visible investment in facilities that support collaboration. An attractive and interactive website may be a good starting point.
 * Modeling Collaborative Behavior At schools/organization, where the leaders demonstrate highly collaborative behavior themselves, teams collaborated well too.
 * Creating a Gift Culture Mentoring, coaching, especially on an informal basis, and networking are a good start. For example, if a mentor and mentee are from different institutions, their mentor-mentee relationship may be a good platform for much wider collaboration between their institutions.
 * Ensuring the Requisite Skills Courses and an online learning community focused on collaborative skills can build those requisites.
 * Supporting a Strong Sense of Community When people feel a sense of community and common goal, they are more comfortable collaborating together.
 * Assigning Team Leaders That are Both Task and Relationship Oriented For outstanding results we need both a good team and focused tasks.
 * Building on Heritage Relationships Start team development with a few people (20-40%) who know one another. If all team members are strangers, it is very probable that they will not be comfortable collaborating.
 * Understanding Role Clarity and Task Ambiguity Cooperation and performance will benefit if the roles and desired outcome are clearly defined, while the team has latitude on how to achieve the task

Full article is available at: * [http://www.internetgroup.ca/clientnet_new/docs/8%20Ways%20to%20Build%20ollaborative%20Teams%202007.pdf www.internetgroup.ca/clientnet_new/docs/8 Ways to Build ollaborative Teams 2007.pdf]