Taking advantage of digital learning environments and collaboration with the world of work are more and more demanded from lecturers, teachers and curriculum designers in higher education (HE) internationally. Often courses and lectures are also expected to be organized in collaboration with teachers from other HE institutions and workplaces both nationally and internationally. In short, the choice of learning environment opportunities has considerably expanded. While the new combinations of collaborative groups and digital platforms create opportunities, they may also burst confusion. Among other things, there is a need to co-configure and co-orchestrate learning goals and methods.

HE teachers’ collaboration to develop education and practices with the world of work has been conceptualized with several models or theoretical approaches. First, in terms of Lave and Wenger (1991), HE teachers can be seen to form communities of practice where competent teacher practitioners collaborate to design curriculum, select knowledge and methods to curriculum and engage students in learning through their pedagogical choices.  In addition, they are expected to organize partnerships and networks with the world of work and other HE professionals to keep their own knowledge up-to-date, conduct research and to provide students with contacts for internships. Teachers also collaborate with workplace instructors and plan learning tasks for internships to support students´ professional growth and their day-to-day guidance and reflection on action, in action and for action at workplace. Furthermore, teachers may be engaged in innovative developmental projects with the world of work.

Second, theoretical pedagogical models, such as the integrative pedagogical model (IP model; Tynjälä 2008, 2009) and the connective model (Griffiths & Guile 2003) have been suggested for picturing learning across boundaries of HE institutions and the world of work. They bring forward the need to combine theoretical learning with practical applications and self-regulated goal setting in order to develop competences already in education. They also give emphasis to students´ self-regulation of learning and their abilities to negotiate learning opportunities for themselves at the workplace.

Third, recently, metaphors such as ecosystems have been suggested to picture the myriad forms that HE institutions’ sub-systems take within rather traditional and bureaucratic organisations to meet the goals (Kemmis, Edwards-Groves, Wilkinson, & Hardy, 2012; Kemmis & Heikkinen, 2012). Characteristics of ecosystems include networks, nested systems, interdependence, diversity, cycles, flow, development, dynamic balance and niche (Capra 2005).

Fourth, from the perspective of educational planning the new combinations of learning environments and networked organisations are changing the the process of recontextualisation. The four-partite chain of knowledge recontextualisation, as defined by Evans, Guile, Harris and Alan (2010), consists of content recontextualisation, pedagogical recontextualisation, workplace recontextualisation, and learner recontextualisation. The multiplicity of learning places and coordinated agreement on learning goals intertwines into this chain. While traditionally HE institutions could be described as (rather bureaucratic) organisations, the networked characteristics of defining learning goals suggest that lecturers are rather participants in ecosystems and/or actor networks (Brown, & Capdevila,1999; Latour 1999).

The aim of the study is to investigate HE teachers’ collaboration in these changing contexts. The following research questions are addressed: 1) how do teachers define their own role for the content recontextualisation, 2) what kind of pedagogic recontextualisation they conceive in collaboration, and, 3) how they have experienced workplace recontextualisation when learning in HE is coordinated across institutional boundaries, taking benefit of digital platforms, in cooperation with other HE institutions and the world of work. The study aims to deepen understanding how teachers negotiate their own positions across institutional boundaries when new ecosystems of professional co-configuration and co-organisation emerge.

The context for the study is two national developmental projects of Finnish universities of applied sciences (UAS). Both projects are based on collaboration between the network of UAS and research university(/ies). On broad terms, they both aim to enhance and develop UAS course provision and students´ study progress through collaboration and through learning from each other´s best practices. The two national projects have different foci. The eAMK project has an emphasis on collaborative development of digital learning environments and shared study provision. It involves most of the Finnish UAS (23 out of the total 26 UAS) a research institute and Rectors' Conference of Finnish UAS. The Toteemi project is more focused on developing combination of work and HE studies, and accreditation of learning at work. It involves 16 UAS and two universities. Even though the investigated developmental projects take place in one country, the questions considering effects of emerging new networked learning environments on HE personnel and their redefinitions of the chain of recontextualisation are international. On the whole, data for the research project is collected both via group and individual interviews, workshop-videos, and surveys for teachers and students and workplace representatives. The focus of this presentation is on four developmental cases focusing on novel ways to organize collaboration between workplaces and HE institutions, and utilizing digital platforms. Teachers were interviewed to find out how their content recontextualisation, pedagogical recontextualisation and workplace recontextualisation has changed through participating in the new emergent ecosystems of learning, which combine shared platforms for learning with other UAS and utilize digital environments in collaboration with one another and the world of work.

In initial study phase of the research, teachers were videotaped while they discussed what well organized collaborative ecosystems between HE institutions and the world of work look like. They were given a task to discuss how they think the activities of these emerging ecosystems could be defined from the perspective of principles, which are characteristic to ecosystems, such as energy flows, boundaries, material, communication, diversity of species or organisms, nested systems and ecological niches. The participating teachers first got familiar with dynamics that have been connected to the metaphor of ecosystem and then discussed them. The initial findings on these discussions from the study´s exploratory phase suggested that there are themes and aspects of ecosystems that engage teachers in particular while the chain of recontextualisation is changing. In the studied workshop these themes included niches, interdependence and networks. In the further data collection we expect to get a more detailed and rich picture of teachers´ views on the changes. In a recent study by Jääskelä et al. (2018) it was found that there is a demand to develop the Networked Culture for HE institutions to ensure that the aims of the integrative and connective approach are better achieved. Accordingly, the study aims to better understanding of the circumstances that construct teachers´ networking practices across institutional boundaries and multiple learning contexts.

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