Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)

Professor Sture Hagglund Abstract

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The Organization of IT at Research Universities/Impacts on Campuses

IT and the Management of Distributed Ph.D. Study Programs
Professor Sture Hagglund, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linkoping University, Sweden

In the future, Ph.D. level education, not the least in the IT Area, will increasingly involve requirements for continuing education opportunities and support for distance education. This poses special challenges, since the depth required of a Ph.D. graduate typically presumes on-site participation in the activites of a research group.

The Computer Science department at Linkoping University is heavily engaged in cooperative efforts with distributed Ph.D. study programs, supporting doctoral students in linked Campuses or in industry. The presentation will discuss three different inititatives, a distributed HCI Research School, the Industry Research School and the Satellite University Colleges network. In particular, questions and ideas related to the prospects for IT support in this context will be raised for discussion.

The HMI Research School links two universitites and five departments together in a joint initiative to provide an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in the area of human-machine interaction. The Industry Research School engages some twenty-five doctoral students sharing their time between sponsoring companies and the department, while the Satellite University Colleges network presently supports around forty affiliated Ph.D. students. This last activity is part of the national IT Uplift, where a major effort is made to improve the supply of IT faculty in the new Swedish Universities and University Colleges. Methods employed include building supervision networks, ambulating courses and retraining of Ph.D. faculty from other disciplines into IT subject areas.

The presentation will offer few novel solutions of IT support for distributed Ph.D. study programs, but rather confirm well established experiences of first generation IT-mediated distance education and contribute to the research agenda for the future.