Key Takeaways

These successful projects show how leveraging relationships and strengths across systems can help sustain and improve the quality of simulation and online learning. Course and program sharing consortiums like SUN Online and Missouri Health Professions Consortium can expand the capacity of colleges to meet both student and workforce demand, particularly in rural areas. System wide efforts like Learn on Demand can create a foundation for new programs and help those programs scale up quickly. Sharing simulation capacity and other laboratory experiences, like KanTRAIN and Missouri Health Professions Consortium, can help create capacity for more simulation and hybrid programs across a state. For programs that require hands-on experiences, hybrid programs with enhanced and distributed simulation components can work and should be a priority. And all of these efforts lead to new and improved relationships across colleges, which in turn leads to more collaboration, more sustainability, and higher quality instruction.

But innovative collaboration is not always easy. Colleges may resist these types of collaboration efforts out fear that they will cannibalize their current enrollments, making choosing what programs and courses to offer across colleges or a system tricky. Coming up with a fair way to fund the start-up and sustaining costs of these efforts can also present a challenge to colleges and systems. One way to address these concerns is by allowing colleges to opt into the effort and creating a fair revenue sharing model. How to divide the tuition and state appropriations allocation can make or break a collaborative effort. Another challenge that these collaborations face is harmonizing institutional policy like start dates, add-drop deadlines, and financial aid rules. When these administrative policies conflict between a student’s home institution and the college offering the instruction, it can be confusing. These policies need to be discussed and addressed from the beginning. Last, specialized accreditation can be a challenge to innovative and collaborative program design, particularly in allied health occupations. Working with specialized accreditors can be time-consuming and colleges may not always be able to address their concerns.