Conference Agenda

In 2023, the Private Sector Partnerships to Strengthen Higher Education (hereafter referred to as “the Activity”) began as a five-year, $4.9 million United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sponsored project with the goal of enhancing the quality and relevance of higher education in Kosovo by fostering collaborations between three public universities and the ICT and agriculture private sectors. This research practice partnership (RPP) was scheduled to run for five years—January 2023 until January 2028. Despite exceeding all measurable targets of performance, due to US Executive Order No. 14,169, the Activity was issued a stop-work order on January 25, 2025, followed by a termination notice from USAID on February 26, 2025.

The RPP’s objectives included: increasing universities’ analytic capabilities to better focus on the needs of private sector and labor market, and enhancing student experiential learning, namely their career development. These two objectives (along with two others addressing market-focused curricular reform and industry applied research) were translated into 11 interventions that impacted students, academic staff (professors), private sector professionals and companies, and university management. Across all interventions, the RPP implementation team (consisting of US-based university experts and a team of 13 in-country professional staff) convened and engaged university and private sector partners and participants using a three-dimensional process to facilitate institutional transformation (Barnhardt, et al., in press).

The RPP’s three-dimensional approach, was based on Micoletta, Lounsbury, and Greenwood’s (2017) empirical work specifying how organizations institutionalize change, focused on: (1) creating and stabilizing structures that allow for productive partnerships, (2) adopting mechanisms that promote a culture of mutual goal setting and shared understanding between partners, and (3) improving the administrative efficacy for implementing partnership activities (Barnhardt, et al., in press). Objective 1, focusing on utilizing data and increasing universities’ data capacities, served a cross-cutting research strategy that activated all three dimensions of organizational change aimed at enhancing practice. Data tasks required facilitating new ways of organizing and structuring data tasks, promoting new ways of relating across stakeholder groups (culture), and looking closely at administrative procedures to ensure their sustainability and efficacy.

During the two years of the RPP, significant progress was made in institutionalizing data-driven decision-making and shifts in practice across all three partner universities. A key component of the RPP implementation was creating educational analytics (EA) teams on each campus, consisting of a distributed leadership structure typical of institutional research functions (Huisman et al., 2015). The EA teams included professors, university management, student affairs administrative staff, quality assurance personnel, database/computing administrators, along with project experts and staff as support. While more developed higher education systems have campuses with well-staffed institutional research offices, student affairs assessment units, or both, Kosovo does not, so these EA teams were both a structural and cultural innovation.

With respect to this analysis, we explore aspects of the RPP related to amplifying career service functions that better support career service functions in universities, to examine data addressing the following questions: What are different stakeholders’ needs related to universities’ career service functions? And, what electronic-tools (e-tools) are most useful for career recruitment, placement, and development? By interrogating these practice-based questions with evidence, we demonstrate how cooperative efforts to bring data and evidence to understanding practice can improve organizational functioning in Kosovo universities. Simultaneously, we use this case of an RPP in Kosovo designed to enhance university-private sector partnerships as an example of how to bring stakeholders together in the development of a career ecosystem.

Reforms in the field of higher education have necessitated a redefinition of the role of universities (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000). In recent years, universities have evolved from institutions that primarily produce scientific knowledge into actors that contribute to the transformation of knowledge into economic value and act as drivers of innovation and economic growth (Weckowska, 2015). In line with these roles, universities engage in collaborations with industry beyond traditional academic publication activities, conduct joint research and development (R&D) projects, contribute to the development of new products and services, generate income through intellectual and industrial property rights, and facilitate knowledge and technology transfer through university-industry collaborations (Barra, Castro-Peña, & Coello, 2024). Such collaborations are defined as multi-actor and multidimensional structures shaped by shared objectives of joint R&D, innovation, and value creation, through which scientific knowledge, research infrastructure, and human capital produced within universities are aligned with the needs, application areas, and production processes of industry (Ankrah & Al-Tabbaa, 2015).

The significance of university-industry collaboration is particularly evident in the context of economic development. In many countries, strengthening university-industry collaboration has become a strategic policy objective aimed at enhancing economic competitiveness, and such collaborations have become increasingly widespread (Bamford, Reid, Forrester, Dehe, Bamford, & Papalexi, 2024). While university-industry collaborations have long been an integral component of higher education and innovation policies in developed countries (Maassen & Stensaker, 2011), their importance has also increased in developing countries (Cunningham & Link, 2014). These collaborations are not limited to technology-intensive sectors but are also evident in the field of education, where educational researchers and education industry actors engage in joint R&D activities to support the development of new educational products and services (Kucirkova, 2025). In this respect, university-industry collaborations in the education sector hold strategic importance by enabling joint research, facilitating mutual knowledge and technology transfer, fostering innovation, and generating economic and societal impact.

Despite their strategic relevance, transforming scientific knowledge into industrial outputs within university-industry collaborations in the education sector remains particularly challenging. This difficulty stems from structural characteristics of educational research and innovation, including the long-term nature of outcomes and the context-sensitive character of educational impacts (Levin, 2013), the strong orientation of knowledge production toward broader societal benefit rather than direct commercial returns (Psacharopoulos & Patrinos, 2018), and the limited prevalence of sector-based R&D activities. Beyond these characteristics, the education sector is marked by a predominantly public structure, a multi-layered governance system, divergent institutional priorities, and a high diversity of actors, all of which complicate the establishment and sustainable management of university-industry collaborations (Kunttu, 2017). Compared to other sectors, collaborations in education therefore involve higher levels of organizational and institutional complexity (Perkmann & Walsh, 2007).

Although the literature has examined various barriers affecting university-industry collaboration (Bruneel, D’Este, & Salter, 2010), empirical studies focusing specifically on the problems experienced by actors directly involved in collaboration processes particularly in the education sector remain limited. Addressing this gap, the present study aims to examine the problems experienced by actors involved in university-industry collaborations in the field of education through an actor-centered and process-oriented perspective. Rather than focusing on outputs or performance indicators, the study explores how problems emerging at different stages of the collaboration process are experienced and interpreted by academics, industry representatives, and technology transfer professionals. Accordingly, the perceptions of problems across different actor groups are analyzed comparatively.

This study seeks to answer the following research question:

What problems do collaboration actors experience at different stages of university-industry collaborations in the field of education?

Within teacher education, the role and practice of research-based learning have been widely discussed and researched in academia internationally (cf. Brew & Saunders 2020, Raberger et al. 2026), yet student teachers question its usefulness for their future practice (Thiem et al. 2020). Instead, they request more connection to their future workplace and point at a disconnection between university courses and practical experiences (cf. Sjølie & Østern 2021). One possible answer to this issue might pose the introduction of student-teacher collaborative research, offering potential benefits for all involved, posing opportunities for knowledge, skill and attitude developments in the profession.

The paper presents methods and results from various small-scale studies within a collaborative practitioner-university project based in Berlin schools and Humboldt-Universität’s teacher education program. In this collaboration, researching teachers and researching students worked together on needs-oriented measures focusing on language-sensitive teaching (https://pse.hu-berlin.de/en/research-studies/projects/bua-schulkollab/site). Overall, 12 teachers and 14 bachelor’s and master’s students collaborated in small teams (2-3 people) on specific problems that arose out of the respective teacher’s practice. The students participated in a research seminar, the teachers were individually introduced to the project; the teams were created based on the students’ thematic interest pertaining to the teachers’ objectives in teaching development. The final presentations were open to all project participants, with the opportunity to discuss the results. The author/researcher was involved in project management and evaluation, but also offered mentoring throughout the collaboration, as well as taking on the role of an expert for the field of language teaching.

This study examines how Teacher Design Teams (TDTs) operate as a core mechanism for curriculum collaboration within informal, task-oriented, and inter-institutional research–practice partnerships (RPPs). It addresses challenges commonly encountered in interdisciplinary curriculum development, including misaligned professional languages, leadership tensions, and limited institutional resources. By adopting the TDT model—characterized by teacher agency, collaborative ownership, and structured design cycles—the study explores how collaborative curriculum design can support sustained interaction and mutual learning between researchers and practitioners.

Rather than treating the RPP as a background condition for collaboration, this study conceptualizes the partnership itself as an object of evaluation. Moving beyond outcome-oriented measures such as curriculum products or individual teacher learning, the study foregrounds the RPP as a dynamic social learning arrangement. RPP effectiveness is examined through the organization of participation, the distribution and negotiation of roles, and the ways in which expertise and authority circulate during joint curriculum design work. This process-oriented perspective enables analysis of how research and practice are integrated, translated, and sustained in everyday collaborative activity.

The study is guided by three research questions: (1) how teachers’ practical capacities develop through sustained collaborative learning, (2) how collective curriculum design contributes to shared understandings of educational reform, and (3) how Communities of Practice (CoPs) are formed and consolidated within an RPP. Drawing on Wenger’s CoP framework, the partnership is understood as a social learning space in which value is continuously generated, interpreted, and reconfigured through participation. In this context, Teacher Design Teams function as the primary enactment of the partnership, rendering visible how roles, responsibilities, and leadership are distributed and renegotiated over time.

CoP theory conceptualizes learning as social practice emerging from the interplay of participation and reification, producing shared regimes of competence. Subsequent developments, including the notions of landscapes of practice and social learning spaces, emphasize the fluid and interconnected nature of learning across contexts and highlight processes of value generation, framing, evaluation, and translation. These processes contribute to participants’ professional growth as knowledgeability—the capacity to navigate roles, identities, and responsibilities across practices.

Situated within this theoretical framework, TDTs are understood as curriculum-oriented forms of CoP grounded in empirical research on teacher collaboration. Typically involving teachers working within or across schools, and supported by facilitators or external experts, TDTs engage in iterative cycles of curriculum design, implementation, and refinement. Prior research shows that TDT participation enhances pedagogical and curricular expertise, teacher ownership, and alignment with reform initiatives. Building on this literature, the present study advances RPP research by demonstrating how TDTs provide a concrete analytical lens for evaluating partnership quality, sustainability, and mutuality through close examination of collaborative design processes.