Abstract:
Collaborative efforts and strategies are widely applied in
modern business and academic environments. Most of the
collaborative learning research has been done on children
and college/university students. Academic and administrative
staff in higher education institutions also learn from interaction
with fellow higher learning institutions. This paper shows the
divergence and convergence of collaborative learning efforts in
privately owned higher education institutions in Botswana. The
main benefit of collaborative learning is that people capitalise on
one another’s resources, knowledge and skills exchanging
knowledge, evaluating one another’s ideas, and monitoring one
another’s work. This paper is based on the understanding that
collaborative learning is based on that knowledge can be created
within a population (academic staff) where members actively
interact by sharing experiences and take on asymmetry roles. A
qualitative research was done on five (5) Botswana privately
owned institutions of higher learning where face-to-face
interviews were carried out to a sample of ten (10) academic
staff, two from each of the five institutions covered in this study,
who were drawn using a purposive sampling approach. Results
of the study showed that there is clear lack of collaborative
activities in the Private Higher Education institutions (PHE)
covered in this study. Instead what stands in the results is
overwhelming evidence of immense rivalry and stiff competition
where higher learning institutions try by all means to bring the
more successful institutions down.
