VetEd.Net

Partnership and collaboration

Partnership and collaboration are the key factors of this proposal. The more institutions participate, the more benefits we will have. Therefore, all veterinary schools, AVMA, AAHA, AAVMC and other veterinary organizations worldwide may be considered as ‘beneficial partners.’

This is a short (preliminary) list of institutions that have outstanding results, and we can consider them as desired ‘key partners’ or role models (benchmark partners):

Organizational structure

Organizational structure depends on products developed, technology used, skills and attitude of employees and users of the product. Because all of this is still evolving, the organizational structure may be a work in progress with a focus on effective decision-making across the whole institution.

Effective decision-making across the whole institution will be increased if:

All governing groups (education, accreditation, and licensure) and all user groups (faculty, staff, students, and veterinary practitioners) participate in decision-making.
Both teaching and business activities are our priorities.
The decision-making capability is fully developed at local and central levels (Bates, 2000). Therefore, a structure that combines centralized and decentralized organization looks like the solution of choice.

Return on Investment

Costs. Technological change comes with many fixed and variable costs. All costs as well should be made as transparent as possible and entered into the model (Bates, 2000).

Largest area of expense. Research shows that labor (e.g., faculty, Instructional designers, Web designers), not information technology, constitutes the largest area of expense in online learning costs (Johnstone S, Poulin R., 2002). That is even more true now when all teachers and students already have computers (or mobile phones) with broadband Internet access.

Freemium & benefits of freemium

Free of charge or paid. Before we continue discussing Freemium, it is important to note that we have numerous options to configure our system to fit our needs. We have variety of schools/associations, countries, user groups, sponsors, courses, donors. For each of them we – as a community or as individual authors - can customize what will be free and what will be premium value-added service. In addition to that, revenue sources like grants, donations and sponsorships can be an important part of the business plan.

Benefits of being free of charge. Having content and online activities for free brings benefits:

OpenCourseWare 2.0

OpenCourseWare 1.0. Because OpenCourseWare started before the success of Google (incorporated 1998), Wikipedia (2001), Facebook (2004) and, most importantly, before the Moodle Community Hubs Framework (2010), it has been focused on sharing things the way it was done in the pre-Web 2.0 environment. It did not fully exploit the use of the Internet’s network capacity and, therefore, it has been using more traditional market logic (Hoppe & Breitner, 2004).