Text for the Conferences on Virtual Universities in Budapest and in Prague (UNESCO, UTB, CVUT), Spring 1998) - Written: August 1998 - 32 ko
PLAN
A new vision of the future of engineering education
Some keywords or concepts linked to NTIC and to virtual universities
The reasons of a revolution : the new features behind NTIC
Consequences and impact on people and on educational processes
Different levels of implication of universities
NTIC used for what or on which component?
Virtual yes, but what can be " virtualized " ?
Who is concerned by the development of virtual universities?
And now the obstacles, the difficulties, the problems to solve
NTIC and virtual universities : some concrete proposals
The information revolution is one of the most important factor of change for higher education and for engineering education. How to rethink higher engineering education in the context of post-industrial societies influenced by of a world-wide globalization ot their economy, by also an incontestable elevation of the knowledge and competency levels and by a more and more intricate situation of productive forces, thanks to the huge development of the electronic networks? Can we invent and establish new ways of education and training that can better take into account the generalized access to specialized information and knowledge and the world-wide networking? The virtual university is becoming the key concept to be taken into account now for the future of higher engineering education.
The emergence of the information technology and society The present situation can be characterized by the emergence of information and communication in all fields of individual and professional life. The specialized information systems, tools and networks become more and more important and powerful. Internet is the most obvious phenomenon of such a revolution. Governments, companies, local authorities, universities, etc. are now strongly discussing the need of new information infrastructures, putting milliards of dollars or ECUs in the construction of information superhighways. They also put emphasis on the need to develop the " content industry ". Data bases, data banks, experts systems, CAE, CAM, CIM, EDI, CD-ROM, CD-I, Internet, Groupware, Websites, Intranet, etc.: engineers, entreprises, educators are really facing a new situation in which information resources (whatever the way of accessing them) are becoming key resources for the development of industry, education and society activities. One can assert today that virtual universities (and the use of NTIC in education) are not just a fashion. One can observes a true explosion of experiments or realizations. For instance, if one tries to retrieve information on the Web, requesting Alta Vista to find pages related to " Virtual University ", one will find more than hundred thousands of references. More than 20 international electronic mailing lists are entirely devoted to debates on distance education. More than 30 international conferences were or are dedicated to NTIC in higher education during the year 1998. Such an explosion of realizations does not mean that traditional universities will no more be useful and that only virtual universities will survive in the future. Nevertheless one cannot ignore that trend and one has to better understand what is behind it.
Higher enginering education should no more be limited to the unique transfer, around the age of 20, of a box of fixed knowledges which can be used during the entire career. The information revolution accelerates the changes in the society and opens our minds to worldwide situations, to experiences and knowledges which we were unable to imagine some minutes before looking at our e-mail messages. Everyone can easily access to pieces of information and/or knowledge which are produced in another part of the world. Everyone can easily access to structured as well as unstructured information, public as well as confidential information. Everyone can easily access but also produce and disseminate information.
Under these conditions, the important question one has to answer is the following: does-it now exist a difference between fixed and structured education on the one hand and worldwide and circulating information on the other hand, in terms of preparing our minds (especially engineers' minds) to face new complex and moving situations and to develop professional activities?
Schematically, one could also assert that there is no more a necessity to build and use an engineering school or faculty for educating and training an engineer. There is no more necessary to geographically concentrate students at a given place and in a given time for teaching them the bases of mechanical engineering or water resources management. There is no more necessary to build class rooms for providing access to information and knowledge.
The role of engineering faculties and schools should certainly change. For instance, they should develop easy access conditions, for everybody, to information and knowledge resources. They should stimulate the curiosity of young people. They should help the students to establish links between scattered and contradictory datas and knowledges (methodological input). They should contribute to the production, transfer and dissemination of new specialized informations and knowledges, as well as they should develop new methods of education based on these concepts.
The use of NTIC in education is not really new. During the last 20 years, many specialists, many educators, tried to find solutions to a not very well defined problem (what to do with computers and information technologies in education ?). At the same time, new concepts of education appeared or, more precisely, were successfully developed and used as for instance it was the case with distance education, or also with open learning. If one tries to clarify such concepts, one can notice the following items :
- coursewares (didacticiels in French) : many professors in technical universities are fascinated by the development of such coursewares, easily availble through Internet but generally ignore the economic dimension of the problem ;
- self learning (autoformation in French) which focuses on the free move of the learners in their learning processes, according to their learning profiles or styles ;
- distance learning and distance education which are well represented by the positive experience of the Open University in UK ;
- open and flexible learning (or education) which puts emphasis of the diversity of the learning routes (at an individual or at a more collective level) ;
- mediated education (use of NTIC and multimedia) ;
- asynchronous learning : the new " time " dimension of education ;
- interactive learning that leads to collective learning processes ;
- cooperative learning (education) which is based on interaction between different groups of people, thanks to NTIC (groupware, intranet, electronic forums,…) ;
- educational platforms which are the most advanced tools for the dissemination of information and knowledge for educational purposes at a local or at a worldwide level ;
- knowledge pools (such as for instance ARIADNE in Europe) ;
- distributed learning environments, integrating different tools (platforms, knowledge pools, forums, etc.) ;
- and finally virtual universities which are of different types, according to their origin or to their development (see below).
When talking of NTIC, one has generally in mind " computers " and " telecommunications " which are only tools and are not so much different (functionally speaking) from what are the blackboard or the classroom. If one wants to better understand the present revolution behind the use of NTIC in education, one must take into account some important features that characterize the information technologies today. Thus, one can mention :
- the digitization of texts, images and sounds ; any kind of document whatever its original format or appearance can be simplified in a given set of digits, O and/or 1, exploited, transfered, reused, etc. at a very low cost thanks to the digitization ;
- the development of huge storage capacities : all my personal work during my ten last yaers can be saved on a cheaper and cheaper hard disk (6 Go) of my PC ;
- in parallel, the development of width-band communication channels which allows access facilities at a very high speed to datas at a worldwide level or allows the transfer of huge amounts of datas ;
- the client-server architecture of the computers that has an impact on the distribution and the sharing of resources ;
- the impressive development of electronic networks, with the fabulous Internet protocol Tcp/Ip that facilitates the decentralized and universal access to datas or files, whatever their format ;
- the interesting and succesful development of hypertext that establishes links between different documents ; hypertext facilitates navigation, surfing and a new concept of discovering the global knowledge world ;
- intelligent agents for retrieving datas, searching pertinent information, translating texts, push technologies, etc., a lot of new tools that help the people when confronted to the enormous, multilingual world wide web ;
- internet, intranet, extranet, groupware, also considered as tools that link people together and facilitate the electronic communication (electronic forums and chats, …).
It is obvious to say now that NTIC are changing the way of communicating, thinking, working,… being,… and also learning. Considering more precisely education, what are the consequences or the impact of the use of NTIC ? Some are very interesting and explain certainly why governments, but also educators, are pushing in that direction:
- teleworking, telelearning, etc. : it is no more pertinent to build huge buildings and campuses for providing courses to hundreds or thousands of students ; learning and working at home (or in any choosen place), having access to decentralized resources, seems to be an unavoidable trend ;
- a new time management : one can choose when one wants to learn something, when one wants to communicate with other people ; one can adapt education (teachning, learning activities) to personal learning styles or profiles, quicker and/or slower ;
- indivual and collective implications : the individuals can develop their own (independant) learning approaches (selflearning) but one can also explore new ways of cooperative learning playing on intercations between people ;
- groupware and collective tools such as Intranet sites, platforms, etc. are very useful for sharing rare (and less rare) resources ;
- new roles facing the use of information : people can be at the sale time user and producer (produser) ; one learns also whan one produces his or her own information and knowledge and disseminates it to colleagues ; - active implication, interactivity ;
- globalization, internationalization : this is an interesting dimension one has to mention ; one opens a window on the world and one can learn from a more diversified and multicultural environment (learning from the world, from a web without frontiers) ;
- a new citizenship in the information & knowledge society ; one cannot use this new information environment and learning facilities without developing new attitudes and ethical values.
Facing the important development of NTIC, universities tried and try to find appropriate solutions for integrating these new tools in their strategy and in their day to day activities. It is possible to differenciate different approaches. Thus, Marcel Goldschmid (Epfl Lausanne) considers four types of universities :
- 'exploring' universities in which individual initiatives are combined with institutional experiences at a given university level, with more structured projects (often with external financial support for these projects) ;
- 'innovative' universities which believe firmly in NTIC and promote innovative usages of these technologies, with more systematic approaches and with the development of educational plates-forms ;
- true 'virtual' universities, developing global projects, created as new institutions for which the extensive use of NTIC constitute managerial and strategical issues (this is for instance the case of the new West Governors University in the USA).
One can also ranked the present experiences on a scale with four levels of development :
- level 1 : towards a global educational scenario : electronic texts, interactivity, assessment procedures, etc., a new interactive encyclopedia, open on the world, created and developed by disciplinary teams in given domains (an example can be founded at ENPC, with the courses on urban hydraulics) ;
- level 2 : development of innovative approaches based on integrated contributions (different specialists working on a global project) : content, information technologies, pedagogy, communication and management ; one moves towards new concepts (educational platforms, knowledge pools, …) ;
- level 3 : towards true virtual universities with the creation of new consortia, decentralized units, cooperative work, resources centres : a new vision on education management for the future.
If one examines more in detail the various present experiences in higher education, one can say that NTIC can be used in four different domains or areas or for four different purposes (independantly considered or combined) :
- using NTIC for stimulating people’ relations or interactions : electronic tutoring, learning communities, global interactive learning strategies ; the principle and system of interactions between people is redesigned (through the use of NTIC) but can also be unchanged ;
- the institutional component as such, with creation of new institutions, partnership, integration of various resources, development of integrated platforms and knowledge pools, development of networks, consortia ; one can consider situations with no subtantial changes in that domain or, on a contrary, with totally redesigned structures (for a more systematic use of NTIC in higher education) ;
- strategical and managerial issues, global projects for new open flexible learning environments with the possibility to enter new educational markets (life long learning, worldwide knowledge industry,…).
These four domains or areas can also be viewed or analyzed as :
- educational issues with emphasis on new learning methods and on pedagogy related to the use of NTIC ;
- communication issues with the development of learning communities and of interactive learning processes ;
- entrepreneurial issues : new educational projects such as platforms, a vision of new educational markets.
When using NTIC in higher education, when talking of virtual universities, one cannot avoid to debate the " what " can be virtualized. Thus, one can consider the different items, which can be independantly or integratively virtualized :
- different groups, subgroups or metagroups of learners, with the possibility to set-up temporary virtual groups, closed or open groups , mixed groups, etc.
- the individual teacher (provider of educational resources)
- different groups of teachers and new virtual teams
- tutors and other contributing people (from industry, from other countries,…)
b) content :
- the curriculum itself (flexible or not)
- the peripheric content (other knowledge inputs from outside,…)
c) evaluation procedures :
- summative evaluation (virtual exams,…)
- assesment of courses
d) logistic :
- coursewares
- electronic libraries
e) administration :
- registration
- fees management
f) the global environment
- facilities (transport, accomodation, financing,.. ).
It is interesting to notice that the use of NTIC in higher education leads to new perspectives in the management of universities and in the cooperation between different groups of people. Thus, when moving towards virtual universities, one has to consider the specific input of the following partners :
- the librarians, the information management experts
- teachers, professors, as content experts
- educational specialists (pedagogy, use of NTIC in education,…)
- communication professionals - editors, publishers, press specialists
- motivated innovators, whatever their domain of innovation
- project managers or leaders - people from outside the University (tutors from industry, …)
- the learners themselves.
Il seems important to say here that most authors and experts consider important to set up ad-hoc multidisciplinary teams for the efficient development of virtual universities.
In many recent international conferences debating the question of virtual universities and the use of NTIC in higher (engineering) education, people point out some serious problems which need efforts to be solved. Thus :
- another problem related to equipment is what is called now the " logistic "crisis (how to maintain correctly the functionning of all the electronic environment ?) ;
- the lack of " mediacy " (especially for professors of a certain age or generation) ; this is a true and serious reason ; one has to set-up policies which can help people in that domain (sensibilization, formation, etc.) ;
- the lack of vision and strategy of the top level management, the managerial misunderstanding of what is happening now and of the new worldwide educational market ;
- the economical problem : one needs fresh money for investing in appropriate resources centres, for paying creators who do not teach but are entering this new educational market, money also for maintaining and developing tools and contents ;
- the intellectual property problem for individuals who want to create new coursewares but will have few returns on investment, problems also for educational communities who will be oblige to pay so much for accessing some licensed resources (risk of monopoly) ;
- the difficulty to cooperate at national and international levels, especially if one needs to establish efficient consortia (are traditional professors able to cooperate on such new projects ?) ;
- some existing rules (as for instance accreditation procedures in engineering education in some countries) which are not compatible with the new openess and flexibility offered by NTIC.
To help educators and universities to enter the new information society, one can suggest some very simple proposals :
- to promote interesting experiences through traditional channels as well as through Internet ; one needs to better know what are the most interesting tendencies, the successful projects ;
- to assess advanced succesful realizations through traditional procedures as well as through new approaches of evaluation and assesment ;
- to involve industry in educational projects, with the purpose to find money for a long term succesful development of NTIC in higher education ; industry can be interested by projects dedicated to life long learning ;
- to sensibilize, educate and train teachers, professors, for a better use of NTIC and for the creation of electronic resources (coursewares, electronic content to be put on platforms or in knowledge pools,…) ;
- to develop incitement procedures within universities for stimulating the creation of new educational projects based on the use of NTIC ;
- to implicate students and young people in the development of new projects : the " web generation " is strongly pushing.
Who would have thought, in 1747, when one founded the Ecole Royale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, with the purpose to educate and train the French civil engineers, that two and a half centuries latter, people would communicate through satellites or optical fibers, would fly over oceans and continents, would cross the Channel using their own car or a fast train (TGV)? Would Diderot, the editor of the French Encyclopedia, have imagined just before the French Revolution that the numerous volumes of his work would be contained on a small CD-ROM and have become a testimony of the information revolution?