Collaboration or Competition: A Case of Selected Private Higher

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.