Why universities form silos
Universities are organized around departments for good reasons. Disciplines have their own methods, vocabularies and standards of evidence, and a department gives staff a home, a budget line and a career path. The same structure can make departmental silos: groups that rarely share teaching materials, plans or even information about what the neighboring department teaches.
Silos are not a sign of bad faith. They come from separate budgets, separate timetables, and promotion systems that reward discipline-specific work. Several introductory courses in different departments may cover the same material, for example statistics or academic writing, with little awareness of each other.
How shared resources create common ground
Open materials do not remove those structures, but they can create reasons to cross them. When teaching resources carry an open license, staff may adapt and reuse them without negotiating permission each time. A few patterns recur.
Shared foundation content. Courses that need the same background, such as basic data skills or citation practice, can draw on one maintained resource instead of each writing their own. This reduces duplication and lets staff compare what they expect students to know.
Co-maintained materials. A resource used by two departments needs agreement on who updates it. That small administrative question often becomes the first regular conversation between the groups.
Visible teaching. When materials are public, colleagues can see what others teach. This sometimes reveals overlaps and gaps in a program that were previously invisible.
Common vocabulary for rights. Staff who learn the basics of copyright and licensing for one project tend to apply it elsewhere, and the library or rights office becomes a point of contact across departments.
Where libraries and support units fit
Support units often sit across several departments, which makes them natural brokers. Academic librarians, learning technologists and instructional designers see requests from many parts of the institution. They can notice that two groups are looking for similar material and introduce them. Where these units are well resourced and trusted, the chance of cross-boundary cooperation tends to rise. Where they are thinly staffed or treated as optional, it falls.
Beyond materials: practice across disciplines
Sharing resources can lead into sharing practice. Staff who co-develop a module may later team-teach, run joint assessment tasks, or form informal groups to discuss approaches. These groups, sometimes called communities of practice, can be a lasting benefit even if the original project ends.
Students can be part of this too. Courses in which students create or improve open materials sometimes involve mixed groups from different programs, though that requires careful coordination of timetables and assessment.
The limits of the effect
It would be a mistake to treat openness as a cure for silos. Some obstacles are untouched by sharing.
- Incentives. If promotion rewards only work within a discipline, cross-department projects look like a distraction.
- Funding rules. Budgets allocated by department can discourage shared spending, even on shared resources.
- Disciplinary differences. What counts as a good introduction to a topic may differ legitimately between fields. A single shared resource may satisfy neither.
- Ownership concerns. Staff may worry about loss of control over how their material is changed or presented.
- Workload. Coordination takes time, and extra meetings are rarely welcomed by busy staff.
It is also possible to produce a new silo: an “open education team” that works at the edge of the institution without engaging the departments it is meant to serve.
What tends to help
Experience reported by institutions, which is anecdotal and varies, suggests a few conditions make cooperation more likely.
- A concrete shared problem, such as high textbook costs for a first-year course, rather than an abstract aim to collaborate.
- A named person or unit responsible for coordination.
- Recognition of the work in workload models and promotion.
- Clear rules about who may change shared materials and how disagreements are settled.
- Modest scale at first, so early projects can succeed and be seen.
These are common-sense conditions, not proven formulas. Outcomes depend on people and context.
How to judge whether silos are really loosening
Signs worth looking for include fewer duplicated introductory modules, joint review of shared resources, staff from different departments co-authoring teaching materials, and students encountering consistent explanations across courses. Signs that little has changed include a repository that is mostly empty, projects that depend on one person, and materials that are open in license but unused in practice.
Because these changes unfold slowly and are hard to measure, claims that openness has broken down silos at an institution should be read with care. A plausible description is that open materials gave some departments a practical reason to talk, and that lasting change depended on whether structure and incentives followed.