New perspectives for higher education processes as a team-based approach – Back-office information technology for higher education and training

Abstract

Higher education has long been considered an area of unchanging persistence. Since the end of the last decade, management of graduate education increasingly has been subject to research. The UniTeach 2000 project at the University of Paderborn focuses on strategic aims and basic underlying concepts of teaching and learning processes in higher education. To date, the project has concentrated on the core of the IT infrastructure and communication concepts having been set up in phase 1. This paper will present a central part of phase 2: The back-office architecture for the management and operational processes of the departments driving the teaching and learning processes on the students’ side. The paper will briefly map out the basics of the UniTeach 2000 framework with respect to the specific goals of the back-office architecture. The authors discuss the role of Groupware technology in the reform of higher education and they conclude that the answer to reform in higher education must be more complex than simply developing more courseware. Functionality and features as well as basic concepts and architectural elements of the back-office framework in question will be outlined. Moreover, the authors will examine the requirement that just as corporate organizations are being radically transformed to compete in a fast-paced, changing environment, university departments must drastically transform themselves in order to survive.