Abstract

This paper summarises the research carried out by three workgroups of French university faculty members (engineers and education specialists) between 1997 and 1999, organised by the scientific group GEMME.

It lists the objectives of introducing information and communication technology in universities and their consequences, organisational and technical. It concludes on necessary co-operation of services to resolve organisational problems. It proposes some technical solutions especially to provide students with necessary resources and tries to evaluate some costs, financial and human, of all this process.

1. Missions and Objectives of the University :

In 1999, the University must become part of the information and communication society. This means that its work and its teaching purposes must adapt to the new constraints of society. This process is long, expensive and it has to go through a number of steps.

The first step is to allow the different actors in the University to master ICT techniques. These techniques must be made available to all the students in all the subjects, but it is also necessary to organise the required training structures.

The University must provide students with the necessary multimedia equipment (hardware, software and educational resources). Today, the number of students who own their equipment is considered to be 5 to 10 %. The University, being a public service, must supply the workstations. But even if this ratio was higher, the University would have to supply the equipment because some of the resources cannot be available anywhere else and the student’s training will also be made inside the University: the use of ICT is not innate, an apprenticeship is necessary.

The next step consists in inserting ICT into teaching practices for two reasons: it will not be presented as an additional subject; it is an efficient way of reducing academic failure by involving the student into his own learning process.

Finally, the last step consists in designing, creating and distributing teaching products. Developing these products involves time and especially a questioning of traditional teaching methods.
 
 

In order to help the University to achieve these purposes, it is necessary to follow at least three lines:

supply students and faculty members with access to necessary resources;

fit all the rooms dedicated to teaching with multimedia equipment and connect them to the net;

promote the distribution of resources and teaching products to the widest possible audience.

2. A new organization for a new University?

As different activities are now getting closer to each other (computer science, video, documentation and information), the internal organisation of the university is evolving. In some cases, the changes are spontaneous, in others they are the result of a choice.

Introducing ICT requires a solution to many organisational problems.

Research shows that many factors can facilitate or handicap the solution to these problems. Some of the factors result from the structure and operating mode of the university, others from the way the universities make their decisions.

2.1. Structure

Due to the large number of subjects and substructures, there is scattering of responsibilities and a lot of idiosyncrasies, which is very unfavourable to the creation and functioning of resource centres. There is dangerous tendency to the proliferation of double services, independent and ignoring each other with divergent equipment and functioning policies.

Geography is clearly a critical element. Geography here refers either to the number of geographical sites or to their location: scattered sites in the same city or in different cities. With some political commitment, this scattering can have positive aspects by creating a necessity to face it through a real networking. It can also have negative impacts because of the financial and structural costs.

2.2. Operating mode and policy of the University

No significant action can be carried out without a strong political commitment of the University managers. But this commitment is useless without the necessary collective reflection. An association of all the necessary actors is an important element of success, and when it has not occurred, decisions made without dialogue have quickly shown the limits of their effects.

Another necessity is to consider the University as whole. All the subject areas must be involved and no particular unit must be favoured: an equal access for everyone to teaching resources must become a leitmotiv. This involves a good knowledge of what already exists: resource centres, products used, available tools, competent services, committed teachers and technicians.

When these conditions are satisfied, some actions appear fundamental:

- The first one is the connection to the net of all the buildings and services dedicated to management, research, teaching or documentation.

- Another key factor is the development of a training policy for University staff.

It is also necessary to have a successful policy of human resources. It is important to ensure a double recognition of the educational work of faculty members, in their career (together with research work) as well as in their everyday practice.

- Finally, there is the question of the modification of the existing structures: merging of different services, or co-ordination and co-operation between them.

2.3. Favorable elements

The experience the University has already acquired.

Its involvement in University co-operation in France but also world-wide.

Local conditions when local government is committed to the promotion of a renewal of education and training.
 
 
 
 

3. Production, distribution and documentation

3.1. Needs

Students need educational products in different situations: in front of the teacher, in a self-training situation inside the University with or without an advisor, in full autonomy at home.

Faculty members need to collect existing documents and products or to create new ones. For the simplest tools, which are usually linked to lectures, they need training and technical support. For more elaborate products, designed for autonomous practice by the students, they need production structures allowing interdisciplinary co-operation. The role of the teacher is always to create the scenarios of the different products.

3.2 Functions: production / distribution / use / evaluation

There are three levels in the multimedia production for teaching:

First level, digitised on-line courses, with possible addition of pictures and hyperlinks, must be available to teachers who already use word processors.

An intermediate level, electronic publishing, projection of digitised pictures, interactive documents, requires a little more technique but it should still be available, if teachers can find resource sites supplying them with the necessary tools, help and training.

The third level deals with more important projects for which the assistance of external companies or university co-operation will be necessary.

Then comes distribution which requires documentation, cataloguing and indexing. Distribution can be made on-line or via media that will be made available through documentation centres. It is clear that their role is very important at this stage.

Using the products requires a technical structure which is described below.

Finally, the products must be evaluated in their conditions of use.

Last, the evaluation of the cost of these operations as well as of the time required in production and in preliminary training is of the utmost importance.

4. Students’ access to ressources

All this involves an important technical structure. This part deals with the crucial question of supplying the students with the individual equipment. Other types of equipment should also be considered: collective equipment necessary in amphitheatres and lecture halls, those to be used individually by teachers and those of production centres, big and small, which should be created and developed in the universities.

4.1 The workstation and its environment

The workstation is a micro-computer fitted with a floppy drive. This equipment makes it possible for the student to work on his tasks again at home or in a different room. The workstation must also be connected to the university network and to the Internet, and equipped with the software necessary to access the different resources.

This imposes a constraint: the safety of the network prohibits anonymous login. Access to the software of the workstation will be possible only with registered name and password.

Each workstation should have access to a printer. One printer per ten workstations seems to be sufficient.

These workstations should be located in 15-student rooms, alternately dedicated to lectures and open access. There could be fewer workstations in libraries and information and documentation centres. In all cases, the rooms are specialised and supervised.

Whenever possible, these rooms should be general-purpose, in order to save money. It should be possible to do everything in every room: no specific room for languages or self-training, because the opening time would not be sufficient. The equipment and support staff must be made the most of.

The rooms should be located in the same place rather than scattered: supervision, maintenance and support will be easier.

Self-access must be sufficient: 45% lectures and 55% self-access seems to be a satisfactory compromise.

Access must be as easy as possible for students, but as safe as possible for the administrator of the rooms. As a consequence, several aspects have to be taken into account:

The question of access to the rooms: for a satisfactory access to computer resources, the rooms should remain open from 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. with a possible access on Saturdays and during a part of academic holidays.

Security: it can be done in two ways, through the control of access to the building and halls but also and especially through the protection of the workstations: each PC can be protected against opening with an alarm.

Lending of multimedia supports: inventory, storing and loan must be carried out by an organisation placed under the responsibility of documentation centres.

Supervision : its first interest is to lower the costs of security. Of course, it has a price but human presence is the best protection against theft. Second, it prevents people from using the rooms as a "cyber café" and makes it possible to monitor the time of use of the workstations by each student. The rooms that work best are those with a constant supervision. The advisor has different roles: keep an eye on the machines, first-level maintenance, assistance to the users and assistance in training.

Before moving to a completely digital environment, it is preferable to keep traditional audio and video equipment next to the multimedia computers.

4.2 Software available through the workstations

Providing the common software requires an access through Windows. The necessity to check the identity of the user leads us to consider the choice between two solutions as to the nature and operating system of the machines:

PC with NT Workstation;

PC with Linux or terminal X operated via a Unix system with a dedicated server (WinCenter, WinDD, etc.) providing the Windows applications.

The software that must be provided is: office equipment, Internet tools, self-training software and specialised software in each subject.

Too few of these applications can be distributed for free. This will lead to substantial costs and different problems with the administration of licences (unless one day the decision is made to develop and use free software). It is better for universities to have a global policy of acquisition of software licences and be in a position to develop the notions of site licences and educational licences with the publishers.

4.3 Local network

The closest server, which must be able to administer as many as 50 machines, must enable access to software and printer.

Other -less numerous- servers on the university network must supply the other necessary services:

Documentation: the local Web tool seems to be necessary in order to circulate the educational, administrative and cultural information to the students;

Electronic mail: it is therefore necessary to make the creation of mailboxes for the students an automatic process via the administrative registering software;

Video on demand: live and recorded television programmes, video bank;

Interactive audio and video in distance learning: this has more to do with the external network, but it requires great changes in the local network in order to develop.

As far as the operating system is concerned, a choice must be made between:

the payable software Windows NT with its range of applications which are payable but widely used and hence inescapable especially in the area of office software;

the free software Linux with free applications which are mainly Internet-oriented.

The setting up of an access to several CD-ROMs on the same server often leads to difficult problems of installation and management. With the quick development of networks, this support does not seem to be viable for current and repeated access for documentation. Access to documentation will be made more and more often on-line towards dedicated servers, local or distant.

The use of the data network for video broadcasting is not yet economically interesting. But commercial and technological evolutions may be quick. Anyway there is a need to transport video on the data network for applications other than broadcasting, hence the necessity to install video cards on the workstations with the use of the MPEG compression format or to have a software solution.

The problem is the same for video-conference: no satisfactory transport on the data network is available, so there is a necessity to have distinct connections for this application.

The current protocol is Ethernet with a 10-Mbps speed. Servers are beginning to be connected at 100 Mbps. Evolutions will be: increase of the speed (1 Gbps) and massive introduction of switching (Ethernet and perhaps ATM).

This leads to the idea that the use of coaxial wire, still widely used in the universities, has become obsolete, and that twisted-pair cabling and re-cabling operations still have to be planned.

4.4 External network

E-mail: the connection of the internal mailing service to the outside is not a problem. The bandwidth necessary for the transfer of mail must not be underestimated, however.

Access to documentary information: external access is considered useful but with some restriction: many faculty members consider that, during their lectures, necessary accesses are limited to a small number of usually well-known sites.

Students’ web pages: it is necessary to separate the students’ pages from the official pages of the university and the problem of legal responsibility requires a constant supervision of these pages.

So, the use of the Internet by the students is possible and we have already said that it was necessary. Three problems remain to be solved:

the best possible securizing of accesses, keeping in mind the growing problems of network security;

an evaluation of the cost of this use for the universities, in order to control it and to compare it to the cost of connections for research and management;

and the crucial problem of the "barnacle-student", hooked to his computer for hours, just to surf the Web.

As the status of the student is in question, it is necessary to facilitate the acquisition of personal equipment, and so, to think about the access of these workstations to the university resources.

4.5 Evaluation of financial cost

In order to make this evaluation, we have started with a first objective of one workstation for 40 students, which seems to be the minimum necessary equipment today. It is clear that a more widespread use of ICT in educational methods will require an evolution towards a ratio of one workstation per 15 students.

Starting from this ratio and from the figure of 1,700,000 students, we reach the number of 42,500 workstations. The price of a workstation is about 1,500 Euros. Total cost: 65 million Euros. A renewal of the workstations every 5 years is a minimum. An equipment budget of about 13 million Euros a year is already necessary.

If we add the cost of printers, servers, active network equipment and software, the previous sum rises by 70% to 22 million Euros a year.

The rest is more difficult to estimate: mail and documentation servers, video servers, proportion of the cost of the university network backbone dedicated to teaching, and the cost of cabling if necessary.

4.6 Evaluation of human cost

We have already talked about the importance of advisors who can be postgraduate students. The problem is to find a legal status to hire them for about 10 hours a week.

The administration of the important number of workstations we have described, of the dedicated servers, of the network, necessitates numerous technicians and engineers:

1 technician for each set of 50 computers and one local server (that is 10 people for a 20,000-student university, with a possible slight decreasing effect);

2 engineers to administer central servers;

1 section head to manage the whole structure.

Geographical scattering dramatically increases the number of necessary staff.

It is estimated that the network backbone is administered by a network team (at least 5 people for one university) and it is necessary to take into account the proportion dedicated to teaching in the work of this team.

Other specialised technical staff will also be necessary in order to help faculty design and create multimedia products.

5. Recommendations

The suggestions made by the workgroups deal with the co-operation of services, the policy of human resources and the general policy of the universities.

For each identified objective, a technical and pedagogical answer must be supplied. It is impossible to imagine that a single service could deal with all the aspects of the question. The solution of the organisational problem requires:

exchanges and co-operation;

taking into account the pre-existing elements;

services common to the whole university;

working in distributed mode to solve geographical problems.

As far as the human resources policy is concerned, the university must solve a certain number of problems linked to the status of staff members, reinforce technical staff and have a real policy of training.

The ICT policy must be part of the general policy of the university. A delegate, helped by a light co-ordination group is necessary to help with the planning, the realisation and the assessment of this policy.

Author:

Jacques Allo, 40, rue de Rennes, BP 3532, 49035 Angers Cedex 01, France

e-mail : Error! Bookmark not defined.

Contact:

GIS GEMME, 8, rue du Capitaine-Scott, 75015 Paris, France e-mail : Error! Bookmark not defined.