Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)
President (Rector) Knut Brautaset Presentation
President (Rector) Knut Brautaset, Agder College, Kristiansand, Norway; Norwegian Commission on Higher Education
The Digital Age: Impact on Higher Education in Norway
Friends and colleagues, I’m very happy to be here at this interesting symposium. I also feel sort of a special relation to the Bay Area, because on my campus in the southern part of Norway, we have the largest collection of Beat Art outside of the United States. And all the art is from here in San Francisco. And the reason is that we had a very intelligent and eccentric Norwegian medical doctor from our region that came here to San Francisco in the 50’s and stayed through the 60’s, and was practicing medicine here. And he had friends and patients from the poor and struggling artists of the 50’s and 60’s. He helped them and he bought their art. But he was a smart man and a keen art collector, with a great knowledge of art, and he had hundreds of pictures from the San Francisco area. And before he passed away, he donated that collection to our institution. So now we get a lot of visitors from the United States to see this Beat art.
While still in Norway, I got the feeling that my responsibility here was to try to sum up this conference or symposium. But I’m glad I don’t have to do that, because as I say here, it has been very interesting. And the most important message that I’ve gotten so far is that we have to continue to exploit this field, that it will change teaching and learning, and that it might change the way we are organized and the way we organize. I feel that nobody has to complete an exact recipe for how to proceed, but we have to learn by using and trying out all the possibilities.
When you see institutions of higher education, universities and colleges, in our environment in Scandinavia, they are funded by endowment. However, they have had a lot of challenges to face. Mass higher education has made a tremendous impact on the universities especially, and some of the colleges as well, because in 25 years the student population has tripled, and at the same time the increase in the population in general has only been 5% or something. So it has been a rapid change from elite higher education to mass higher education in Norway. That has made the whole area of higher education more important politically. It has also made higher education a tool for the politician; especially when we had the trouble on the labor market, they pushed in a lot of students. Also, as a trend in the whole Western world, there is an unwillingness to fund mass higher education on the same scale as elite institutions were funded. That is true not only of Norway, but all over Europe, and maybe in the U.S., too.
Then you have this notion of a learning society, and this new idea of the knowledge economy. For the politician, the emphasis is on usefulness, outcome, and research. What has probably suffered most in Norway is the basic research within humanities and social sciences, and to a lesser extent in the sciences.
Another new thing is the digital age, which has become the subject of conferences, this one included. This technology is a new tool that these institutions have to use. It’s actually a tool that you’re using while the tool itself is developing. It’s like developing an airplane while you’re flying it, in a way. You see, you have to exploit the new technology. It imposes changes in learning: tasks within the institution change, institutions might be transformed, and there is competition from other, unknown providers. We have also talked a little bit about knowledge brokers, people that like to get hold of the information and the competence on the campuses, and then use those to their advantage as brokers on a sort of knowledge market. All these things are then influencing higher institutions, which should be defending their mission, their autonomy, their values, their responsibilities, their academic freedoms, and should also have outreach on their own. So I feel this is a crucial time that we’re in. The Daring Report from the UK had some influence in Europe. I don’t know if it had so much influence in the UK, but the concept of the learning society and some of these statements have made a big impact on the thinking in Norway.
Now, I would like to go into what kind of national strategy we’ve had in Norway and have at the moment in terms of information and communication technologies in higher education, and also in life-long learning. The government doesn’t really know what to do. I don’t think that’s so terrible, because this conference also shows that institutions are not quite sure what to do, either. But what the government has done, which I think is very wise, is that it has created programs and infrastructure that will increase the possibility for positive development. Then it’s up to the institutions themselves to utilize those possibilities, and they have been very good at creating these new things. I’ll mention just a few of them here.
The first one was started in 1972, the Norwegian Library System, which is a very good system and was very advanced for the time of its creation and development. By now, it is probably the database that’s free to everybody to search. And if you are a student, you get an ID and you can get all the information you want through that system. It’s also a shared system for the university and college system in Norway. The other initiative that probably has played the most important part in what we’re discussing now is the UniNet, or the Norwegian Academic and Research Network. All campuses have access to Internet and to UniNet, which is owned by the Ministry of Education and Research and Church Affairs. The goals are to develop a national electronic computer network, and it’s working very well. UniNet tried to encourage the open use of standards, the networking, in order to facilitate traffic exchange with national IPS, and to stimulate research and develop activities in this area. And we also have a Nordic thing that’s called NordUNet, which is a corporation, and has also contributed to a developing technical infrastructure. So this is part of the government’s interest activity that’s sort of given to the institutions to use.
I’ll show these two maps. The one to your left is the map of all the state colleges. If you take away the map you can almost recognize Norway just by the dots. To the right you have the four universities marked with red, and the university colleges are the small white ones there. So you can see our system. And UniNet is serving all these systems. The yellow triangle is the head of UniNet in Trondheim. This is a very good system and has served these institutions very well. UniNet also has a research network with the high speed nets; you see the main links here, starting in the north with Tromso, Trondheim, Bergen, and Oslo, where the universities are, as well as some other places where they have either engineering or information sciences, or are into this ICT use in education, like Lillehammer that we heard from today. So this is the research net, which is also a very high-powered net.
Another thing the government has done is to create the SOFT—the Norwegian Executive Board for Flexible Learning in Higher Education, a national agency. The distance learning project is important. The central factor is the relationship between didactics and technology. They’re accepting applications, and funding quite a few interesting projects. Then they started these networks of collaboration between institutions, and there are several of them. The largest one is the Netlatics University, the Network University, which includes two universities and seven state colleges in a good working operation. With the Net University, we’re discussing what kind of roles the different institutions should have. You see here a scale, the bottom scale, we have low cost, medium cost, high cost; and then on the vertical scale here you have non-credit, small courses, and more credit-based courses that can maybe accumulate towards a degree. You can sort of place yourself and your initiative where you want to be. So for the Web-based universities or the collaborations that we’re in now, we concentrate on these brown areas, mostly credit-based courses, from a medium to a high cost. We have to use technology that is available for people at home, so that’s limited to 64 kilobits per second; when the telephone company increases their capacity, then we’ll increase the technology for this web base.
This last one is the Norwegian University Network for Life-long Learning, which is actually a joint venture between universities, colleges, the Confederation of Norwegian Business and Industry, and the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions. It's very special. All courses, net-based or otherwise, that are available to the general public and to students are going to be on a database where people can go in and find what is available in their district or in other districts, so that these courses will reach as many as possible. In terms of organization, the database and the course market are the most important things. The course market will be a market between institutions and industry to find out their common interests. The database will be so that everybody can go in and see what’s going on.
The other thing that has happened is the competence reform, which is national reform, activated both by act of Parliament and through negotiations, and has implications for higher education. The government now has a large program for ICT innovation in education, which impacts teacher education, with a special emphasis on primary education and teacher training programs to improve methodology in the use of ICT in teaching and training. The last item I have down here is the home as an arena for learning, because by use of new tax rules and special leasing, an individual can now get PCs with an Internet connection for their home very, very cheap. That has stimulated a lot of people to buy and hook up and get going. My neighbor is a policeman, and he’s surfing all over the Internet and picking up courses. So this is working.
I just want to emphasize the challenges. Adequate political measures to improve ICT in the context of higher education and life-long learning, obviously, depend on the best possible understanding of future needs and of the learning process itself. We do not need unreflected adjustments to reversible technological progress, but we want to see ICT used to meet individual needs and to support and develop the community, business, and industry. That’s the scope of this. Then we have the issue of social cohesion. Everybody knows about the knowledge gap, people that now do not have enough knowledge to be able to further their learning. This gap might be widening. So in this digital age, with an emphasis on self-realization, individualization, and complete freedom of choice, how do we secure and, if possible, strengthen social cohesion as conditions change? In welfare states like Norway and Sweden and Denmark, this is a very important issue. Universities and colleges have a moral responsibility in this respect, and what do they do about it? For small nations, languages and their cultural identity are a concern. As this conference is all in English, which is the new Latin of the world, it’s obvious that some of these things influence the type of language and vocabulary that we use in Norway and in Sweden and in Denmark. And in some ways, regions and smaller nations feel the consequences of the digital age as a threat to their cultural heritage and language. Do the universities and colleges here also have a special responsibility in these countries? These are the questions they are asking.
The discussion that we had just before lunch, the university as social institution, was very interesting, and I think very, very relevant. I feel that with so much emphasis on digital and distance education and short courses, that's not enough when it comes to learning about facts, knowledge, skills, or understanding, and especially understanding, because I feel that that requires a meaningful amount of time and an element of concentration. You can’t zap remote controls and click mouses and think that you’re really getting into a fruitful activity where you’re going to really, really learn something. It requires something more. One more thing: how would a campus like this be if we didn’t walk to lunch and meet a lot of students? I strongly believe that it is a very, very important value for all societies that young people after high school can spend three or four years in an institution with a combination of learning and research, and experience the social environment that a campus encompasses.
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