Structuring a Local Virtual Work Ecology for a Collaborative, Multi-Institutional Higher Educational Project

This chapter focuses on a multi-institutional shared curricular-build project (2009) out of Kansas State University, Johnson County Community College, Kansas City Kansas Community College, and Dodge City Community College. This project involved the building of a range of digital learning objects for modules for an online course that will be taught at the various institutions in both online and hybrid formats. This collaboration is unique in that it brought together experts from cross-functional domains (from both the empirical sciences and the humanities) for an interdisciplinary freshman level course. The team collaborated virtually through computer mediated communications and built e-learning based on instructional design precepts. The curriculum was built to the standards of the public health domain field, the Quality Matters™ rubric (for e-learning standards), federal accessibility guidelines, intellectual property laws, and technological interoperability standards (with the curriculum to be delivered through four disparate learning / course management systems). This chapter focuses on the socio-technical structuring of a local virtual work ecology to support this “Pathways to Public Health” project.