Metropolitan
Area Networks – The Opportunities for Collaboration Amongst Universities
Robin McDonough – Director of Information Systems
University of Manchester, UK
The development of Metropolitan Area Networks has provided universities
with a unique opportunity to collaborate amongst themselves and with commercial
and industrial partners. This talk will provide a description of developments
in this area within the United Kingdom, describing the national strategy
that has been adopted and how that has been applied to one particular region,
the North West of England, in which there are sixteen universities. This
talk will describe the trend towards Regional Area Networks and outline
the many opportunities for collaboration which now exist following the
installation of such a network.
Quality
Process as an IT Strategy
Annick Bernard, Sigrun Fredenucci
Grenoble University, France
The "Centre Interuniversitaire de Calcul de Grenoble", CICG, is
Center for Information Resources and Technology shared by the five universities
of Grenoble (representing 63,000 students and a number of renowned research
labs). CICG provides Management Information Systems (MIS) and backbone
networks. MIS software is Unix, Oracle client/server based. Major issues
are availability, performance and security of data, as well as software
maintenance and improvement.
Quality requirements led to the development of middleware around
BMC Software "Patrol" knowledge modules. In this context, documentation
about systems administration is designed according to ISO 9002 standards.
Issues discussed include: staff incentives, control of computing activities,
risk assessment, quality and performance requirements, reactivity to technical
troubles.
Introducing
Information and Communication Technology for Teaching in French Universities
Organisational and Technical aspects
Jacques Allo
Université d’Angers, France
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.
Collaboration
as a challenge:
New learning environments
embedded in old traditions
Joergen Bang,
University of Aarhus, Denmark
Hans-Peter Baumeister,
German Institute for Research on Distance Education, Germany
Kevin Wilson,
Open Univiersity, United Kingdom
The European tradition in higher education is built on the authority
of professors appointed to a chair undertaking research as well as teaching
their students. This medieval structure of universities still operates,
so that the university represents one of the few European institutions
which can trace its roots back to the twelfth or thirteenth century. Lecturers
and their students came together at real places at real times to undertake
scholarship. These crucial conditions have determined universitas litterarum,
the university. Over time this basic structure has developed a wide variety
of institutional forms. The European sector of higher education consists
of a complex of institutions operating within different academic traditions
and different national policy guidelines for education. Organizational
differences between institutions are considerable and reflect dissimilarities
in staffing structures, student recruitment, course assessment, programme
validation and even the very language of instruction. Add commercial and
industrial organizations to the equation and the differences are compounded.
In principle these fundamental conditions have to be considered when we
are talking about collaboration in Europe. Collaborative projects and knowledge
networks that fail to take into account the traditional self-image of universities
as well as the fundamental differences in the institutional cultures of
partner organizations are not very likely to get off the ground. When the
potential of virtual learning environments is added, the traditional university
system faces new challenges such as student-centred, personalized and flexible
learning combined with inter-cultural approaches to provide adequate structures
of transnational collaboration. All in all we are witnesses of developments
towards a new quality of universitas litterarum, namely a step towards
a new way of collaboration among European universities in which resources
are shared, different ways of thinking about a topic are confronted, trans-national
and comparative studies are supported and learners add a European dimension
to their learning experiences. This paper examines the potential of the
new learning environments - in particular in the area of the Humanities
- in the light of a number of current projects [e.g. the Coimbra Humanities
Model; the CEFES project etc.] utilizing European networks and considers
the way that the application of new technology is beginning to blur the
distinctions between traditional universities and distance education providers.
It also offers an assessment of the pedagogical, professional and technical
conditions required for the mainstreaming of collaboration in the university
curriculum.