John MacColl reports. This article appears in the Web, and not the paper version of Ariadne.
The UCISA annual management conference (Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association) reviewed a significant year. Diana Warwick, Chief Executive of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (CVCP), was the first of many speakers to refer to the impact of the Dearing Report. The Report, she said, had asked CVCP to deliver a compact between Higher and Further Education, just one of several applications of a hybrid approach discussed at this conference. "We need to develop hybrid systems combining all aspects of C & IT, training and support." Warwick then went on to make a telling comment, echoed by others. "The key issue is not technology management, but people management." The sort of comment which might have raised eyebrows at earlier UCISA conferences was accepted without demur.
The CVCP, Warwick stated, was fully behind yet another hybrid, the hybrid manager. And the Dearing Report itself, she stated to a hall in which a large number of hybrid managers sat, was of an importance to Higher Education which had not yet been fully appreciated, particularly by the media which had whittled it down to the issue of tuition fees. Warwick went on "Its outcome has had true value beyond mere efficiency gain." This, if correct, gives the Report seminal significance and suggests that we may be about to live in different times. Funding, however, will be critical to its success, and Warwick anticipated a shortfall of £800m by the year 2000. Hybrid managers therefore require to find hybrid funding. We do at least have the Dearing Report to help us move forward: a Report which is ground-breakingly innovative, and inspired, in Diana Warwick's positive conclusion, the image of windmills striding across open countryside, offering a sustainable, renewable energy source, and representing new and exciting generators of power.
The managers faced with the funding challenge described by Warwick may consider some of the lessons of those US universities currently exploring the international market in distance education. This is a market worth $100b per annum, said Art Gloster of Florida International University. A significant change, according to Gloster, is the loss of institutional loyalty by students, now customers of education, "particularly those studying at a distance." Gloster's key to the future is asynchronous education. He cited the trend towards public-private funding partnerships. For large companies looking to invest in the higher education market, cash-starved universities may be forced to act as the subcontractors. Ted Smith, Dean of Engineering at Coventry University and former Head of Computing Services at the University of Central Lancashire, provided an alternative view of asynchronous education, and one which left delegates wondering whether UK universities could afford it. Describing some very high-quality CD-ROM-based courses developed at Coventry, Smith concluded that they take twice as long to prepare as do conventional courses, and are six times as expensive. Studying them via workstations as opposed to sitting in lecture rooms, uses three times as much space. Equipment maintenance costs rise from zero to over £600 per year. At present, therefore, Smith concluded that such asynchronous course offerings had to be reserved for high-volume courses.
Harvard Business School's Chief Technology Officer, Susan Rogers, provided the conference with a breathtaking presentation of a near-complete digital university in action. Three years ago the School set itself the goal of transformation from a paper-based institution into the world's leading user of technology in management education. All staff and students were obliged to learn to use the Web Intranet or be left behind. Students now register online and have a single username and password for all systems. Everything from stationery to interlibrary loans is ordered on Web-based forms. Lecturers can review class lists which are updated dynamically using a Java engine. They can set questions for students in advance of classes, receive assignments and conduct discussion using the same medium. Even legacy databases are now linked in to the Intranet. This is a pioneering institution setting standards for universities all around the world. Rogers described the achievement as the creation of a breakthrough service. "True value beyond mere efficiency gain" would be Diana Warwick's way of describing it.
But this is not technology for its own sake. The philosophy expounded is that an understanding of technology is required by the best managers in order to allow them to make the best business decisions. We saw again how higher education and business are becoming interwoven through the use of high-quality technology. Nicky Gardner, Chair of JISC's Committee on Awareness, Liaison and Training (CALT), described the activities of the new committee, which is a vehicle for usable technology in HE. JISC was five years old in April of this year, and Gardner felt that it had moved, in the course of its five years, from an emphasis on infrastructure, in 1993, through an emphasis on applications in 1995, to its current emphasis on the human and organisational issues which surround IT.
"Technology is no longer the issue" said new UCISA Chair Jon Duke, in summing up. Investment clearly is. Geoff McMullen, Chief Executive of UKERNA, pointed the way towards US-style private-public partnerships when he stated that "top-slicing as the chief method of funding IT in UK universities is dead". Transatlantic network charging, which was obviously on the minds of many delegates, will begin to prove his point. But there will be a lot to mourn. Jill Foster described the major contribution of the JISC-funded Netskills project with nearly 8,000 staff having been trained on Netskills courses, and over 20,000 users of the online Internet tutorial TONIC. Will it be able to sustain this when it has to raise 50% of its costs?
IT can transform higher education. This conference presented hybrid managers with hybrid solutions. But the funding questions remained largely unanswered. There clearly can be no breakthrough without investment, and, for many participants the windmills will remain only a vision, with noses to the grindstone the reality for another year.
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This article last updated/links checked on 17-May-1998