The greatest obstacle to collaborative, cooperative, collective approaches to education is the bureaucratic nature of modern universities. Bureaucracies are hierarchical, self-serving structures of little boxes whose major purpose is to protect organizational self interest. They argue that people are a creature of the structure within which they function.
Departments are the center of the old structure.
The postmodern movement has been a reaction against the atomistic and mechanistic features of modern bureaucracy, but so far university structures remain entrenched departmental bureaucracies. The few innovative efforts of the late 1960's and early 1970s, e.g., cluster and experimental colleges, have been mostly snuffed out by the resurgence of the all-powerful departmental model. The departmental structure is reinforced by the disciplinary structure. Along with the Industrial Revolution and modernism came extensive specialization. The academic manifestation of this trend was the invention of multiple, specialized, professional disciplines.