Choose your partners: flexible provision of higher education in Australia

Most Australian universities claim as a matter of policy, if not practice, to embrace flexible provision of higher education. Implicit in the expressions used - 'flexible provision', 'flexible learning', 'flexible delivery' - is the notion of providing choice to learners. The choices made available may be in various domains such as time, pace and place of study, program entry and exit points, content selection, assessment tasks, and media used for tuition. One possible domain for choice is the choice to learn independently or in collaboration with others. This paper was stimulated by a Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA) Evaluations and Investigations project which investigated the effectiveness of models of flexible provision of higher education in Australia. The investigation raises questions about the extent to which new learning technologies, which afford choice in various domains, are much used to facilitate voluntary collaboration between learners. It also raises questions about collaboration between providers and others which has the potential both to broaden and to narrow choice for learners. The paper provides instances of collaborative arrangements for learners facilitated by use of new learning technologies and instances of collaboration between providers, and between providers and the wider community, which extend the choices of learners. The paper advances a set of criteria which might be employed to evaluate the effectiveness of such arrangements.