4 Universities Create an Alliance Against Onslaught of Technology Vendors

From The Chronicle of Higher Education — January 23, 2001
By Jeffrey R. Young

Hoping to present a united front against the onslaught of technology companies offering distance-education products and partnerships, four state universities have formed an alliance to share information and make joint technology purchases. The group's leaders say, however, that the partnership is informal, and that it will not spawn for-profit spinoffs or ambitious joint course offerings.

The members of the alliance are the University of California at Berkeley's extension program, Pennsylvania State University's World Campus, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin's Learning Innovations program.

"We're all being besieged by vendors from the e-learning industry who are trying to pick us off one at a time and make deals with us singly," says Gary W. Matkin, the dean of continuing education at University of California at Irvine, who is helping to coordinate the alliance. Irvine is not a member, however, in part because it does not yet offer many distance-education courses. "We could develop a much better approach to these vendors if we were to collaborate and share information."

The four universities involved have much in common when it comes to distance education, says Michael J. Offerman, dean of continuing education at the University of Wisconsin. Each offers more than 100 online courses, and all were active in earlier forms of distance education, like correspondence courses.

"We're trying to figure out, How do we use the Web to improve what we've done in a correspondence format?" Mr. Offerman adds.

Mr. Offerman says that the group formally announced the alliance last week in part to respond to rumors that the four state universities were starting a more formal consortium. "There have been institutions that are asking, 'What are you up to?'" he says.

Officials from the four universities will meet two or three times a year and also participate in periodic conference calls. The talks will focus on four key areas -- marketing, technical issues, student services, and faculty relations. The alliance's first meeting was held last month at Berkeley.

Although the universities have similar offerings, they do not consider themselves competitors online.

"Our real competition will not come one from another but probably from the outside," says Mr. Matkin, of Irvine. "We feel that we're all going to be better off if we can cooperate." Possible competitors could include other universities with large distance-learning efforts, like the University of Maryland University College, or partnerships like Michigan Virtual University, he adds.

When forging the alliance, officials decided not to create a joint corporation or a formal consortium. "The transaction costs of doing consortia in a formal way are very, very high," says Mr. Matkin.

The leaders also made a conscious decision not to name their group, which they simply refer to as "the alliance of four."

"We particularly decided not to have a formal name with a set of letters that people could talk about," says Mr. Matkin. "We did not want to tout this as some big new alliance that's going to take over the world."