Teaching Collaborative Governance Online: Aligning Collaborative Instruction with Online Learning Platforms

This article focuses on the value of aligning course content and delivery in online instruction. It expands our conceptualization of online learning platforms and multiple instructional roles in the context of teaching collaborative governance. The School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona has developed a Collaborative Governance Program for graduate and professional students to learn how to work together more effectively across institutional, geographic, economic, and social boundaries in different policy domains. In this article, we present the two basic pedagogical building blocks that support the program’s online instruction—collaborative capacity and collaborative learning—and describe how the program is integrating multiple online learning platforms with multiple instructional roles. We conclude by discussing how to generalize from these experiences and how the program is working to evaluate the effectiveness of these instructional approaches.