Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)

President (Rector) Tove Bull Presentation

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President (Rector) Tove Bull, University of Tromsø; President, Norwegian Council of Universities

The Virtual University – Organization and Future Scenarios – Impact on Campuses

Outline (handout)

1. What is a virtual university?

2. Challenging possibilities

• Reaching more people for education
• Flexible educational approaches
• New student categories
• Diminishing the differences between full time and part time students

3. Pedagogical challenges

4. The quality question

5. Conclusion (Two critical questions)

• What is desirable?
• What is possible?

Having read the information about this symposium and seen the participant list, I decided that my contribution should be a problematizing and critical approach to the issue. In fact, I have more questions than answers. Still, my point of departure is a recognition of the fact that technology exists. The internet, the World Wide Web, multimedia presentations, electronic classrooms, power point presentations, electronic interactivity, cd-roms – you name it – all these phenomena are here to stay and to be improved. And of course it all makes great impacts on research, teaching and learning, and thus on university campuses. To phrase it in a paradoxical way: virtuality is a reality.

What is really a virtual university? It’s a rhetorical and up-to-date term meaning just about everything, and nothing. For instance, it could well mean a university taking information and communication technology into moderate use, or it could mean a university with practically all studies offered online (God forbid!) The ’virtual university’ is more of a marketing term with an unclear content, but it does the job for the universities which want to convey an image as updated and innovative without really having to do much more than just using the label ’virtual’.

If ’virtual’ is synonymous with an extensive use of information and communication technology, then there is one point which is frequently underestimated; i.e., the question of objectives. If the objective of introducing ICT is to gain efficiency and improvements, it is imperative that other organizational changes are introduced, too. There seems to be a tendency to think that the introduction of ICT in itself will provide the required changes. This ’myth’ is reinforced by an ICT industry which benefits from and depends on our naivety. Since this factor is not taken properly into account, we hear of public ICT scandals from time to time.

The major point is that the introduction and use of ICT must take place along with a debate on what we want, where we want to go, and how we are going to initiate the changes and innovations. Maybe the most important consequence of the concept of the virtual university is to look at it as a golden opportunity to reconsider and revitalize a discussion about the roles and functions of universities.

Undoubtedly, ICT opens up a lot of challenging possibilities:

• Reaching more people for education
• Flexible educational approaches
• New student categories
• Diminishing the differences between full time and part time students
• Shift from traditional university education to life long learning
• The need to prepare students for a technology based society

Pedagogical challenges and new ways of learning are of course current issues, but again, the real challenge lies in how to make the existing pedagogical approaches work within the ICT framework. For instance, how is it possible to establish a critical scholarly discourse within the framework of a virtual university? This is far more complicated than the ICT advocates proclaim.

Increased virtuality means increased accessibility, which in turn means increased competition. But it does not mean increased quality. On the contrary, there is a risk of reduced quality. One of the main fallacies in this connection is the tendency to mistake increased accessibility for increased quality, in the same way that information is confused with knowledge. The combination of increased competition and a ’religious’ belief in technology may lead to a worst-case scenario of educational institutions selling diplomas "by mail", or rather by e-mail, of which we already have seen several examples.

A certain downsizing of the university campus is probably bound to happen, since a greater part of the student bulk will be extramural students. In the future, I presume that a great bulk of the student population will be ’cruising’ between campuses and local arenas. This again brings forward the question of regional cooperation, and also regional, national and international competition. Furthermore, establishing flexible education presupposes changes in all established administrative routines, like admission, deadlines, etc.

To sum up, I do not think that the changes in the years to come will become as comprehensive as predicted. More than likely, it will be a gradual development.

Anyway, from a quality point of view one has to distinguish between these two questions:

• What is desirable? and
• What is possible?

The focus of the universities should of course be on the first of these two questions: What is desirable from the point of view of effective learning and good research-based teaching?