Creating and sustaining collaborative connections: tensions and enabling factors in joint international programme development

The joint development and delivery of co-branded programmes across universities and countries promises enhanced visibility for partnering institutions, stimulating synergistic collegial relationships for teachers, and expanded opportunities for students to access a wider range of courses enhanced by a broader range of international expertise. At the same time, the development of such programmes is potentially fraught with difficult logistical, interpersonal, organisational and managerial challenges. A growing literature from fields of inquiry outside higher education has begun to address these challenges. This literature offers useful guidance to higher education practitioners and researchers in appreciating the range of factors involved in significant collaborations across institutional and national boundaries, identifying issues that commonly arise in such work and considering ways of accommodating these factors and issues in order to navigate the complexities of international collaboration in programme development. Data from a case study of such programme development across two universities on different continents, one in the UK and one in Australia, are used to identify critical factors to be taken into account. These factors, considered in the context of inter-institutional collaboration literature, provide the basis of a framework for joint international programme development which explicates each factor and the relationships between them in order to guide future collaborations. A common collaborative space that enables such joint work to occur despite inevitable differences between the parties is a central part of this framework.