Abstract:

Cooperation between universities is, every year, a more important phenomenon. It occurs regarding one of the three fundamental missions of these organisations: research, teaching and public services. While cooperation in research is something more studied, teaching and learning cooperation are not as much known and this kind of cooperation activity is in progress. The aim of this presentation is to present the framework and the methodology actually used in a research project that want to understand the effective process of these cooperation activities.

A research done in 2012 on Dual-mode University showed that we could consider an institutional change as a policy, which is basically following the same kind of process than a public policy. From that point, we developed a framework to understand cooperation between universities regarding programs and other student learning activities and a specific methodology to reframe the institutional policy process, the currents that crosses this process and the main ideas behind the struggle of the actors who try to influence the different stages of this institutional policy.

To achieve this goal, we will use two different perspectives of the public policy analysis: the cognitive approach and the actors’ dynamic approach. The two perspectives of the public policy analysis are first described in global to explain why and how they are useful in institutional policy analysis process, especially to understand cooperation between universities regarding teaching or programs. To achieve the goal of our research we are considering three aspects. We first consider a university policy related to inter-institutional cooperation as an institutional policy in the perspective of a public policy. Second, we shaped analysis tools that are inspired from two different - and considered as complementary – approaches. The first is related to the cognitive approach of the public policy analysis while the other is based on the actors' dynamic approach. Third, we will use the first approach to reassemble the baseline of each policy and the other to redraw the currents that cross the policy process of these institutional policies and the struggle of the actors. We also decided to consider 5 different cases that are achieved and successful. These cases will be presented and discussed. Cases that goes from shared programs or shared courses, to international extensive cooperation between more than one university and more than one program.

Keywords:

University, merging in higher education, institutional policy, public policy, cooperation, collaboration, internationalisation of university.