Friends,
Larry Michaelsen and I spent Thursday and Friday together working on the final pieces of the Team-Based Learning in Social Sciences and Humanities book. We talked about the recent discussion on the TBL listserv about dues for the collaborative.
The mission of the Team-Based Learning Collaborative is to "promote the understanding and evolution of Team-Based Learning across the educational community." We do this at the annual conference, on the listserv, by the website, in print, and in person.
In person, we give away our materials all the time because we know who they are going to (if they are graded assignments, then we only give them to people who we are confident are teachers who will treat their security with respect).
But there are several aspects of that one-on-one contact worth considering:
1) It often only happens because people found the Collaborative through the website, listserv or books. All of the Editors of the two (soon to be three) TBL books have signed their personal royalties over to the Collaborative to help keep it going.
2) That one-on-one contact doesn't get that material out to the broader audience of people who need it. To do that, we need a less personal--but still secure--method for disseminating our material to the right people. An organization and a secure website helps us do that at a level security and quality.
3) Some people are uncomfortable initiating this one-on-one connection for many reasons. Larry has been told many times face-to-face that folks "didn't want to bother him." An organization and a secure website help us make resources available to these folks.
The point recently made about differential dues for members in developing countries was good one, and the Board is going to take it up. But for members in first-world countries, $60 per year is $5 per month, and that goes to support the web-hosting, conference-call arrangement, materials and other administration necessary to keep this organization going and growing.
At some point in the future, we'd like to offer scholarships to graduate students so they can attend the conference, thereby helping the professors of the future in getting started with TBL early in their careers. But we want offerings like this happen in a systematic, dependable way year-after-year, and that requires a dependable source of revenue.
The energies in this conversation are all rooted in the love we have for this pedagogy and the desire we all have to share it. The fact is, that an organization like the TBLC is necessary to facilitate that sharing with the broadest possible appropriate audience, but it needs revenue to survive that doesn't come out of the pockets of the handful of us who have been doing the heavy lifting for so long.
The people who influence how the TBLC operates are those who join in the fight with the same level of commitment as the rest of us: paying our dues and spending many hours each and every week pushing the ball forward for others. If you want to improve how we do what we do, I invite you to join us and lead the way.
-M
|
