Mapping Academic Collaboration Networks: Perspectives from the First Year of the Reusable Learning Objects CETL

The 'Reusable Learning Objects' Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (RLO-CETL) is a five-year project (2005-2010) involving staff from three universities (London Metropolitan, Cambridge University and the University of Nottingham) in a collaborative programme of development, deployment and evaluation of a range of multimedia learning objects that can be stored in repositories, accessed over the Web, and integrated into course delivery. One of the goals of the RLO-CETL is to provide sustainable and reproducible processes that will allow sector-wide collaboration, so as part of the internal formative evaluation of the RLO-CETL, we are concerned to analyse its character, boundaries and evolution, and how this develops in relation to individual and institutional contexts, priorities, structures. In this paper, we present some of the results of 'mapping' tasks in which twenty-eight participants (who included lecturers, tutors, students, multimedia developers, administrators, evaluators and managers) represented and talked about the networks of people with whom they communicated. There are aspects of the maps that indicate how the network of the RLO-CETL interacts and overlaps with institutional and individual networks.