Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)

Associate Professor Skotte Mårtensson Presentation

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Associate Prof. Skotte Mårtensson, Director, Centre for Information Technology in Education, Lund University, Sweden

I have some different approaches to the question of determining cost. Of course, it will be related to my frame of reference, which is mostly Lund University, but also the knowledge of what’s going on in this area. I also want to bring up the questions around it, i.e., to do or not to do. That’s the main question in this digital age: are we going to participate in the digital age? Are we going for distributed learning? Are we going for distance education? And so on. I put the question in this way in order to see differences, plus and minus, of these options for the university and also for the students. So I try to look at it from economic, social, and educational points of view.

If you look at this question from the university’s perspective, there are a lot of benefits to being involved in the digital age. We can put many more students in the lines. We maybe don’t need as many classrooms as before. But we have to rely on a very good IT structure, which is very good for on-campus education, too, of course. The staff is more efficient and motivated, at least in my experience working with the CITA, the Center for Information Technology, for about five years now. I can reassure you that the professors and teachers, as they become more and more involved with using IT, are more and more motivated to do very good lectures. To work with IT and IT-related things, though, means much improved contact in between the students and the teacher. It is also easier to handle individual students in using these kind of tools. What are the results of that? Yes, we have more active students, more independent students, more modern students, and also students who are more attractive to the job market. I think all of these things are on the benefits side of the cost analysis.

Then we have to compare these benefits with the costs. Well, from the university point of view, there is a higher demand in terms of course materials. It’s more expensive to create new course materials; we heard it yesterday, and we know it by experience, of course. Another thing we don’t talk very much about is that a lack of quality in the courses is much more visible when using the IT things. We also see some shifts of the heavy points in between the class and the distributed student. Now, of course, that means a kind of a certain educational turbulence, much more discussion in the university, much more discussion in the department, and so on. That may be very good; it may not be on the costs side, but we can discuss that.

We need high speed networks, of course; that’s crucial to working in this area. Most of the universities are very well equipped with networks today, and the Swedish government is providing us with very good networks, so I think in the future this should not be a very big question. But, of course, there are costs involved in working with these high-speed networks. Then we come to the hard things, the computers and the peripherals. Of course, that is a kind of a cost to get this running. We need re-education; we had to rearrange some of our programs to make them more suitable for students at a distance. That’s both a benefit and a cost. We need more guests, I think, and we are also supposed to build up more updates from the different lessons.

Then there is the student’s point of view. As for as the benefits, courses are time independent and room independent; students have access to courses worldwide, a global offering; and there is no traveling. Maybe there is some travel to some centers, but not as much as before. And that means that the housing and so on can be much cheaper. There is also the possibility of adjusting the tempo of the studies. I think that’s a very good thing in the perspective of long-life learning. In the future, I mean, we are supposed to be students all our lives. After the automatic stay in the university, the distributed learning concept will be very attractive to people in the life-long learning mode. It may very well be that students and fellows are around the world, they are anywhere. Wherever you are traveling, you can find friends. I think that’s very good for the future, too.

One risk is the cost for the students. Well, a limited human physical network demands self-discipline. We know from experience that it is very hard to be a student alone, in some places, and have the same temperance and the same activity. For some of them it is a problem, for others it works very well. Sometimes they are frustrated by the delay on the feedback from the teachers at the universities.

What should happen, then? I think we can’t afford not to not to be involved in this development. We have to move into the future, with the World Wide Web and all that kind of things. There are no possibilities for going back. It’s not possible to go back, we always have to go to the future. We can’t afford people to be lost. We have to keep the gap between societies very, very small. That’s a very crucial point. I also think it may be the most difficult thing to put a cost sign on. What does it cost to keep all the people involved? That’s another approach to thinking about how to determine the costs. For me, there is no other answer. There’s no question that we have to be included. We have to continue working with IT, working with this IT concept. And I think in the long run the governmental costs will be lower, because if everyone is involved, then yes, there are benefits.