Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)
President (Rector) Boel Flodgren Presentation
President (Rector) Boel Flodgren, Lund University, Sweden
I am very happy to be here. I am traveling with a wonderful group of people coming from the Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences, and we are happy to make this journey coincide with this conference. And we are studying in this very dynamic environment, a lot of what is happening with regard to learning new technology, new initiatives in general. I have the very honorable task, then, to say a little here.
Actually, I am the Rector from Lund. There have been some comments here about how the administration or the leadership of universities act and engage themselves in this particular question. And I can tell you, here is one very engaged person on these issues. I come with an experience from 20 years ago, when I was working as a law professor (law is my field) together with Swedish television. And we made a multimedia project in labor law for the whole population. Quite a few, actually, signed up and took this course and got credit for it. It was on television, and it was on the radio, and there were different kinds of programs on the radio. We had new types of questions constructed, and we had written material, and we had... well, I don’t know what we didn’t have, actually. This was a good experience. So I’ve always felt that there is more to be done for universities than just being in the classroom, no matter what the technology at that particular time would be. So this is my background, then.
I’m very happy to be here at UC, if I may take a minute for that, because at UC Berkeley, it’s very similar in many ways to Lund. We also have a big comprehensive research university. We have a medical faculty, which I understand you don’t have here. We have had a long-time relationship with the whole University of California system, with an agreement for an exchange of students, for more than 30 years. So right now, there are about 40 Lund students somewhere around here, on this campus, and in the system; and 40 California students staying in Lund. So, actually, we feel very close.
Anyway, my task then is to say something, as I feel it in my role as an administrator, or a rector, from the point of view of what a big university, a research university, can do. I think development is going much faster than we understand. So we really have to reflect on our experiences. Research, research, research, of course, is very, very important, but it seems that the questions are moving, while we try to construct our research projects. So it’s like shooting at a moving target. And I think this is a problem, really, and it’s a more superficial experience than we’re used to when we work in universities.
But let me then say a little about how we work, in Sweden, on these issues. I have a few slides here, just to give a presentation. Lund is somewhat similar to what we have here at Berkeley. We have the students, now, when we focus on the IT issues, ICT, as we call it mostly, they have programs where they have education available for this. These are interesting figures, I think; the bottom line there is that 92% of entering students have their own personal computers when they enter the university now at Lund. Somebody mentioned the Urosand region; this is the cooperation that we have, some sort of University of California system, actually, in the Urosand region. You know, Denmark is right on the other side of the sound; we’re down at the very south in Sweden. There are 11 universities, then, working together. We try to strengthen up. As you can see, the number of students is together 118,000, and the budget, that’s in Swedish crowns, is not so interesting, but you can see the size. The two big ones are, then, Lund and Copenhagen on top, and it’s very close.
So this is also very interesting information; actually, it was just published in Sweden, and that has to do with the maturity of IT skills. It’s a very interesting conference that we are at, actually, because here are people who are very familiar now with this new technology. I think an amazing figure is that 99% of the use of IT is then done in 55 countries, globally, which makes you think.
This is the challenge, a few of the challenges. Of course, this is old stuff for most of you people in this room, that we are expected to deliver; you can read for yourself, there’s nothing new in this slide. And, of course, when it comes to the output, we are expected to have particular qualities in the students, as you also see here. And this is quite understandable, everybody knows this, that it is not trivial, to say the least. The questions are the same. Quality. Quality. Quality. I mean, we are really taking on this challenge, I think, risk-wise.
Then you come to a big university as an example. I just want to give you this presentation so that we can together reflect on the big issues, and give examples of how you might go about this. Because there’s a whole tool box of things that you have to get in place, in various ways, where you’ve got the structure, money, attitude, student influence, and whatever, to get the complete action or development going. So you can ask these very fundamental questions, and we are, really, thinking about that. Somebody was talking about the revolution, and I agree with that. But it’s hard to grasp it, and what’s going on. Of course, these are the buzz words, that it soon will end up in a deeper insight. And I very much agree with the Socratic attitude. I mean, we should never, ever throw out the baby with the bathwater here. So we really have to focus on the classical idea of learning, or the question of what universities are for.
But there are a lot of things we can do with this new situation. And there I want to stress the active learning part, which is a basis for the way we think about it. And, of course, active learning means a change in the teacher’s role, teachers are less of authorities; I think these are also insights that most of us share. I would say, and this from another point of view, that of the rector, that when it comes to the rector’s role, or the administration’s role, or the central level's role in this, we must emphasize the importance of strategy, the importance of putting together the ideas, where do you want to go, how to go about it, how much money shall it cost, and all these things you really have to start with. And you can have strategies for various things--for outreach, for working together with the school, in particular. But in all these strategies, ICT is a common denominator, and how can it be used, and there should be some coherent thinking in that.
These are some of the ideas that lie under all this development. One of the last speakers raised the question of whether we have all these good teachers. Of course, we don’t. And we really have to get things going with the students and the teachers that we work with. At Lund, then, we build on the resources that we have, start with that. So when you have a strategy, part of that is investigating what’s actually there. I mean, there are wonderful things going on, and they’re all important, from a managerial point of view, from a priority point of view, if you want to develop active learning and ICT. So in a big university, you have all these departments. And the important thing, not that you need to read all of them, but generally, you recognize department subjects and so on, all these are assets, they are fundamentals in the development, in terms of knowledge, about how IT could be used and developed.
We also, of course, focus a lot on what kind of support systems we have today, and then we try to put them together. There you have CITA, the Center for Information Technology, and you can also here read for yourself. Everybody who is in the administration of universities knows that this is not an easy task to get these things, but we really try now to get these people to work together, put them in same building, and most of them, not everybody, will get a room there. They are quite enthusiastic about it, actually. There is a lot of expectation now of how these things will develop. Here are just some examples of a few research projects that we focus on right now.
Here is another research project, which brings me to the insight that I will share with you, that you can’t do everything by yourself. ‘Lud Stat Lihar,’ which means ‘Lust to Learn,’ is a research project that I want to tell you a little more about. It is a strategic cooperation between seven universities. We have a very interesting and new media company, called the K-World, which is also the provider of the dramaturgy in this, and the technology, partly, but also the know-how in how you tell a story, as they say. Universities aren’t good at all these things. Again, I want to mention the Lillanberg Foundation, which is crucial for Swedish development. And they’ve been very generous in terms of support, they’re very innovative, and they are also supporting, to an increasing degree now, not just research projects, but also pedagogical research, or pedagogical projects. So we’ve got some money for this project already.
So what do you do, then, when you want to learn? We created something we call ‘Learning Lab.’ There is the house where now everybody’s moving in, it’s already there. It is a pedagogic forum with the emphasis on pedagogy. But there is also the Net Lab, for instance, the people who are developing our support in the libraries, they’re very good at IT; and our computer lab is going to move in there, together with the people who are responsible for pedagogic development for teachers. We are also creating a platform for the students, where all the students will then have access to e-mail--everybody gets that when they enter the university--and their own portal, with a substantial amount of space where they can keep their own things going. They’re very excited about this, actually. And we have developed it with the help of students, so it’s consumer-oriented.
All this is free, of course, for the students, since we live in a publicly-funded system. And I think that’s a crucial issue. When I hear some of you talk here in presentations, for a Scandinavian country it’s a very crucial issue, when talking in terms of coming first to the market, and so on. We rather tend to put the demands on government. And we have to rethink these issues because government will not be able to sponsor or to pay for all this. So we have to find new forms of working with the private sector. Of course, we already do that to a large extent. But I think there can also be in-between solutions, where, for instance, it is deductible on the employer’s side, so it is basically financed through the tax system, but in which employers have an incentive and the employees have an incentive. And in these systems, the employee becomes more employable, not just better to use for the employer, that he happens to have right at this moment. So I think there are important thoughts that have to be made.
We have an office for continuing and distance education, which is growing very rapidly. That’s their home page. And the virtual university is presented in this way. Of course, the virtual university, as we learned this morning, is like the elephant, you know: you can’t really explain what it is, but you recognize it when you see it. It seems to me that we can use this concept for various things. It’s basically, I think, if you work a lot with a new technology and have a lot of provisions...
This is then a web gateway. We have then developed a tool; when we wanted a technology for this, people traveled around the world, looking at the possibilities, because you shouldn’t invent the wheel again. But they came home and said, ‘Well, the way we teach and the way we educate in Sweden doesn’t fit with the tools that are available today. For instance, the teacher is not up here, the student is not here.’ Swedish students are very, you know... we tend to think that it’s a mess in school. But, actually, what they bring with them from the school is that they always question now, and the teacher is not the evident authority. And I think that’s actually an asset in this knowledge society, where you get very active, sometimes quite fussy, children. And also the children in school are used to working in groups much more, they’re not competing one-on-one to the same extent. So when you develop a tool like this, you need to build on the way that you teach them.
We have also developed a model for support because the student and the teacher is at the center of these efforts. We have quality assessment out on the right-hand side, a system for that, where you have special people following what is going on. And we have developed a special evaluation tool called ERA, evaluation, and that is an instant assessment opportunity. And up on top is the Lund University Virtual Interactive Tool that has been developed. And that’s now selling very well worldwide. And you see, this is a model then that we have elaborated. Why do we want this distance education tool? Well, it costs a lot of money for sure, but it actually has brought a lot back, as well. The teachers have been developing their pedagogical ideas around this new technology, and the university has invested a lot of money in this. But now it’s put in a particular company, and it’s brought to the market. It’s very successfully, actually. This is a community, we look upon it as a community.
May I just share with you the insights of this, which is, I think, the most important part. What is there to think about when you go ahead? Well, I was mentioning the public or private funding. I mean, funding is very important for all this. And, as you see here, I think it’s a combination of several factors, since broad-scope change does not come about by one strategy, or by putting a few people together, or by letting faculty experiment. You cannot rely on the ‘fire souls,’ as we call them, the enthusiasts, but they are very important for the development. But you have to put some infrastructure under them. The student-teacher relation should be in focus, according to me, so active learning has to do with lots of insights about how learning happens and comes about, and quality at the focus. We discovered, for instance, that girls are very good at this. This is something that we didn’t expect, we thought the girls would be hesitant towards all this technology. But they are really in on this, and they are chatting and they’re very successful. And we can see that this is a new generation, because I always thought that our generation is not that way, it seems. Here, I mean, among 40 speakers, I could count six or seven women speakers, so I think this is a male activity, basically, anyway, in our generation.
Faculty is, of course, what the central level can do to help these things come about. You have to create support for teacher structures, for instance, seed money for teachers who want to experiment; a marriage system for teachers who do this. A computer-friendly environment for students is crucial, and you have to have student interference on all this. You have to have strategic partners; I was mentioning K-World, and we’re working with China TV University; we’re working with a big insurance company called Scandia, I think you know about it. And we all help out on these things. Because you should not be doing things that you’re not good at. I do not think that you can save money on this. But look upon it as an investment in the future of the university. That’s my bottom line.
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