Transforming On-Campus Education: Promise and Peril Information Technology in Traditional Universities

Abstract

The governing bodies of all European universities have identified opportunities that, in the mind of the friends of technology, take the form of Napster universities where students would download from a huge reservoir of courses created by a multitude of universities what suits them and be able to send questions to professors from anywhere in the world. In 1998, in the framework of a plan to support innovation in teaching, the Rector decided to promote the Campus Global project conceived, initially, as an intranet designed exclusively for teaching purposes, and which aimed at complementing and supporting on-campus teaching. In effect, the loss of identity of university teaching as opposed to that at the secondary level is the result of political, economic, social, and demographic factors that led to the 'schoolfication' of university teaching. Unlike the post-graduate level where individualized service to the student is characteristic and essential, the criterion for teaching at the undergraduate level is spreading a scarce resource - the teacher - over the maximum number of students, while setting limits on the effort the teacher must expend to protect the time devoted to research by expressing this in formal terms of number of hours lectured - or credits.