For the most part, the collaboration is within a single institution. It can be especially difficult to use materials produced by other people. As the TLTP deliverables find their way into institutions, an important part of the evaluation process is to ascertain just how widespread is their use, what kind of difficulties and delights lecturers experience as they introduce the materials into courses, and the extent to which the 'not invented here' syndrome prejudices their implementation. The MANs initiative has taken the notion of shared resources one stage further. Whilst one likely outcome was to facilitate communication among the research community by means of video conferencing and the high speed transfer of various data types, it was also envisaged that the networks would provide the infrastructure to enable HEIs to share learning technology applications electronically.
Collaboration is an important word in the vocabulary of the future of learning technology.
It is a challenging word, in an environment in which diversity of provision is valued. No one is going to pretend that it will be easy to collaborate in the development of new learning technology resources, or to implement the shared products.