Workshop B - Session 1

Title: Using Broadcasting and the New Technologies - A European Overview Chair: Dr. Josie Taylor, Open University, UK Sally Reynolds, University of Leuven, Belgium

At the moment my expertise lies in video conferencing, satellite television, and interactive technologies for teaching and learning.

I would like to just say something briefly about the context primarily in which universities are now working, and some of the challenges and topics that I think are relevant to this discussion. I am sure you know the pressure that is on the higher education sector better than I. These include financial pressures. We have just heard in open session Tom Collins call, for example, for a shift in spending from third level into primary and continuing education.

We are also under continuing pressure to provide access - to provide our own form of lifelong learning. The former rector of my university coined a very nice expression: 'We no longer can say that we issue degrees, we can only say that we issue degrees with a maintenance contract.'

In other words, we help to provide some mechanism where the knowledge and expertise is maintained and expanded. In the university sector, we have a very strong role to play in the maintenance of knowledge. Teachers and university professors are no longer sole operators; they are finding themselves more and more to be team players, and I am sure we will come back later to this development of team skills.

New Players

There are also a number of new players. The traditional universities in Europe, the same as everywhere else, are very nervous about some of these new industry players that are entering our world, for example, Oracle and IBM.

Further factors include the fact that traditional learning is becoming more and more flexible, so the lines between continuing learning and traditional learning are becoming increasingly blurred. In universities in Europe you find new flexible learning centres, the old open learning centres and the computer departments are merging, and we are seeing a blurring of the distinctions.

Access/Success

However, I am not the first person to say this, nor probably the last, but access does not equal success. If we simply define access to technology as being a sure way to guarantee access to lifelong learning, then I would suggest that we are barking up the wrong tree. We have to provide services and support for lifelong learning not just the technology.

I am also made very nervous by the drive towards a particular technology, the Internet. People continuously say, 'Everything can be done on the Web; everything can be provided by Internet.' I think that just does not work. We have to look at the media mix. We have to look at synchronous as well as asynchronous technologies. We have to look at face-to-face as well as distance learning. We have to look at the mix very carefully and shape it to what our pedagogical objectives are.

There are also a lot of issues around time. Universities traditionally take a long time to do things. The industry sector, on the other hand, likes things to happen right now. And there is always a tension between the two and I think we have to find ways to overcome that.

I have been lucky enough to be involved in projects that have been supported both by DG13 and DG22 in recent years. However, I do feel that sometimes some of the funding that is provided by agencies at the European level funds the wrong things. We inevitably have to put in proposals and project ideas that take a couple of years to realise by which time the technology has changed and everything has moved on. So I think we have to look at our funding and fund far more often in the training area rather than in the infrastructure and the content area. The investment in people's skills depreciates far less quickly than that in content and equipment.

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