Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)
Professor Sture Hagglund Presentation
Prof. Sture Hägglund, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linkoping University, Sweden
IT and the Management of Distributed Ph.D. Study Programs
A paper based on this presentation is available at http://www.ida.liu.se/kk-ffs/distr-PhD.pdf
I’m in the Computer Science Department at Linkoping University in Sweden, which is a fairly large department, with seven subject areas, 30 professors, 200 employees, and so on. I will talk today not only from my perspective as being active in the Computer Science Department, but also from a perspective on a more national level. My talk focuses on a very specific topic: Ph.D. studies. I think that’s a little bit different from what one usually thinks about when talking about the use of information technology, its use in the area of Ph.D. studies. Since I come from computer science, it’s obvious to me that IT is the solution. I will not talk very much about the solution, but I will discuss the problem. In fact, I analyze the problem-setting in this area of Ph.D. education. And I will also limit myself to my area of Ph.D. education in the IT area. That will be the specific focus of this presentation.
So when we think about the future challenges in Ph.D. study programs in the information technology areas, I see three issues. One, is the increasing need for interdisciplinarity in the training programs. In a Ph.D. program, you need to be very clever in your own area, you need to go deep into your area of specialty, but increasingly in the IT area, your problems will be selected from a broader scope than before, and you must integrate knowledge from many areas. The other aspect of this interdisciplinarity is, of course, the requirements the Ph.D.s produce. When they come out and do their work, they need not only to be specialists in their particular area of Ph.D. studies, but they also need to cover a broader area. So interdisciplinarity is an important challenge for us.
Another issue is that IT education in general, and Ph.D. education specifically, cannot ideally take place only in the university. The kind of systems we need to study, the technologies we need to test, must be tested in real environments, and we must seek industry as a laboratory or the society outside the university as the place where we need to do the studies. So that is the second challenge, the interaction between the academic institution, where we train the scientific abilities of the Ph.D. students, and the outside world, to which we relate those problems.
The third challenge is an increasing demand for delivering Ph.D. education at a distance. Traditionally, Ph.D. education is very much based on direct interaction between the supervisor and the Ph.D. student. In the future, and already today, in Sweden at least, we see an increasing demand to have people outside the university also participating in Ph.D. training programs.
So these are the three issues I would like to discuss. And that brings me to another aspect. Because over the years, I’ve also been working with other organizations in Sweden. There are some research foundations, like the Foundation for Strategic Research, with a special emphasis on creating research schools with interdisciplinary approaches; there is the Foundation for Knowledge and Competence Development, which has a special interest in promoting both industry-university cooperation and also the new university-colleges and the new universities which will ultimately be developed from converting this model.
What I will do now is say something about three such initiatives in the Ph.D. training area, and share with you my experiences and thoughts based on these experiences. So the first is research school and human-machine interaction. Obviously this is very much an interdisciplinary area. So there is a research school created, funded by the foundation for strategic research, which is based in two universities in five departments. And you see here the areas that it incorporates, so there are both Communication Studies from the Arts & Sciences faculty, and more traditional Computer Science and the Schools of Engineering in these universities. Presently, there are 60 Ph.D. students involved in this program, in these five different departments.
If I then try to summarize the problems and future possibilities for information technology, and new ways of learning and training and so on in this particular initiative, I would say that the first problem was to create a joint course program. And, in a sense, it’s an easy assignment--just select courses from various departments and offer them to students. But really what you need to do is to improve ways of both designing and delivering courses, so that they are suited for students from various backgrounds in the different departments and different subject areas. This school has been in operation for about three years, and we still see that most of the courses are taken by students in their own departments, but there are also courses now moving from one department to another, being delivered for students in other departments. Of course there are also a number of summer schools and such things.
That also brings us to the second of my points here, that the physical interaction of students is extremely important, and the courses in which you bring students together from all these areas are the most important ones. As you might expect, we try to use modern technologies with conferencing, and delivering lectures in that fashion, and we have done that to a certain degree. But we had some problems using it in such a way that we really feel that we categorically improved something. So that was the first challenge in designing this interdisciplinary research education.
The next thing has to do with the desire to provide research problems from the outside world and to provide access to an environment in which you can study these problems and experiment with solutions. So it’s an industry research school, it’s a joint effort between the university and a number of companies. We currently have between 20 and 25 Ph.D. students belonging both to a company and to a university. It’s interesting to see what has happened, because this is not a place where we just offer applications for participation, but it’s also a process of finding the right kind of people, the right kind of companies, the right kind of problems and so on. And we expected from the beginning that it would be mostly rather young students going into this program, in order to combine advanced education at the Ph.D. level with a connection to industry. But we have also seen quite a number of more experienced people from industry coming back into Ph.D. programs when they were delivered in this way. So it’s an interesting mix of newly examined students from undergraduate education, and more experienced people with 5 to 10, and even more, years of experience in industry. The students may be in the university, funded by the company, going to the company one day a week, or something like that. They may be in an open company, spending most of their time in the company, just coming to the university for courses, seminars, and such things, and for interaction with the supervisors. Quite a number of them are also in non-local companies, in companies in other places in Sweden, which makes it a little bit more difficult to participate in the activities on campus, but, again, we are challenged to offer new ways of participating.
What we have used so far in this environment is not surprising, with the conventional use of IT for Internet-based information, e-mail, and so on. Some of the courses are given at a distance, so that people do not have to travel in order to participate. The most interesting results so far have not been in the sense of improving the educational style, but rather this mix of theory and practice. This mix isn't limited to technological innovations; we managed to link together one newly examined student with very recent training in the IT area, and one more experienced person from industry, which has a more outdated training in IT, so that when they work together on a problem, the person from industry knows the problem and the environment very well, and the student from the university has the most modern technologies available.
The other challenge here is the short time to market for knowledge, which means that in the IT area it’s very tough to require a student to go to school until they are 25 or 26, and then to come out on the market and really apply the knowledge which they have acquired over many years in the university. And I think this might be one topic to return to because several people talked about life-long education. Now we not only see the need to have an education, so that you can start working with that education and then come back and refresh your education, but we also see the need in the IT area for the best students, who want to get to market rather rapidly, to come back to the research school after, say, five years, and go a little bit deeper. And that creates little challenges in how we organize our education, because traditionally, we knew that we would have these students in the system for a number of years and could organize the material very logically.
The third challenge now is that, as you have heard, there are quite a number of new university-colleges and universities in Sweden, places which do not have very much in the way of research, which typically do not have organized Ph.D. education, but which have ambitions to deliver undergraduate education at the same level as the older universities. There is also political ambition to provide these universities not only with research, but also with Ph.D.’s in a way. So what happens in a department like ours is that there are quite a number of students from these new university-colleges, teachers who do not have a Ph.D., students graduating from a Master’s program who are interested in still belonging to their university-college, but who also want to participate in an effective Ph.D. program, where they can fairly rapidly get to the point where they have the Ph.D. and then can continue in their local university-college.
Another initiative from the KK, the Foundation for Knowledge and Competence Development, has granted some 25 million for an IT uplift for these new university-colleges, with the idea that the Ph.D.s produced will have a higher probability of continuing in these local colleges, rather than going to industry or going somewhere else. The method for doing this is to organize supervision networks, to organize forms for delivering Ph.D. education in networks so that you can link students in these places together with supervisors and still produce the course in more mature universities such as ours. Ambulating courses is one way that has been tried so far, and of course you can also see the potential there for delivering courses over the Internet. But in Ph.D. education, it’s very hard because the course not only consists of learning a skill, but also very much depends on interaction and such things.
The final point, and one of the more interesting points, concerning this IT uplift is the interdisciplinary retraining program, which is the idea that it’s easier to find a good physicist or a good philosopher somewhere who is prepared to move to one of these new university-colleges than to find an IT specialist. And in many cases, these people are also quite proficient in information technology, even though they are not formally trained. The idea here is that a person who has a Ph.D., who has done research in his own area of specification, is then able to master the level of information technology to be competent to act as a teacher and scholar in the information technology area. And that again connects to this interdisciplinarity requirement, because here we get people from other sides who can contribute very much to the IT area by bringing their research standards from their area of physics, or philosophy, or economy, or whatever, and they can renew the areas. So I think this is a very interesting initiative. This particular program is something we just started, and as it was just put into operation this year, so far we do not have very much experience of what happens.
So then to wind up, I can say that for Internet communication and information management about courseware and so on, it’s very easy for everyone to participate in the life of the research pool and the research group to which they belong. So that is part of the natural standard basis for the whole thing. When it comes to delivering lectures and many of the seminars over video, I don’t think we are very advanced. We have used it, and I think it works fairly well when it’s point to point and you link two environments together. It’s much more complicated, though, to link many places together and have a good interaction. So far, I don’t think we’ve managed to do this in an effective way. For those people who cannot travel to the university all the time, it may still be worth it, but for the most part I don’t think that we have improved on it so far.
It’s also my experience that in the kind of training you have in the Ph.D. program, the audio channel is extremely important. The video is not critical, but computer scientists want to improve the teacher, the moving things, and then they forget about the sound. If you have perfect sound, then you can accept bad picture. But you should never trade bandwidth for the quality of the sound in order to improve the picture part, at least not in the kind of application we have. In the area of computer-based learning, in these particular initiatives, we have not used it very much. So I'm speaking more from experience in undergraduate education. And I must say, since my own Ph.D. dissertation in the 70’s in the area of patient management problems delivered by computers for physicians, I think that progress has been very slow over the years. I would never have expected that after 25 years, we would still not have more than we have. Of course, there are a number of new programs and techniques around, but the progress is surprisingly slow.
Simulation and training is very important. And I think someone mentioned before the possibility of using the computer for simulating cases and handling these cases. And we are doing research in this area, but that research is not yet mature enough to be really applied in the training programs. The simulation and training part may be more important for the undergraduate applications, while the learning companion approach, with collaborative learning over the computer, is an approach which I think has more potential for Ph.D. level education.
And finally, examination may not be so important in this area, but I still think that we definitely need much more support for improving examination, as well as the link between examination and teaching, at least in my experience in Sweden. As I mentioned, my Ph.D. many years ago was in patient management cases, and these were actually used for examining physicians in surgery. And in our university, we have an on-line examination for the program courses, but I still think there are many more things that can be done.
© 2006 UC Regents
Last modified: 15 April 2006 | e-mail