Evaluation of the Swiss Virtual Campus - Schweizerische ...

SVC Final Evaluation. Background Report Lepori and Probst
On the other hand, there is some reticence about technical support services at national level,
including the repository project, where especially people from the social sciences and
humanities feel that exchange of learning materials will function better in small networks.
5.4 Final appreciation
The overall picture of the management of the SVC programme which emerges from the
information we collected looks quite positive. Almost all the actors participating in the
programme agree that decision-making process and management have been good and also
that issues which could have become rather problematic, like financial reporting, were managed
reasonably if take into account the complexity of the Swiss system. Also, the project selection
process has been managed professionally and most activities promoted by the coordination unit
have been appreciated; especially, the choice of having on-site monitoring, even if time
consuming, seems to have brought better interaction between the programme from one side,
CCSPs and projects on the other side. The different administrative rules for universities, FIT
and UAS, originating from the complex governance of the Swiss higher education system,
certainly made this task more complicated; it is a positive aspect of the SVC, due also to the
flexibility of all involved actors in finding practical solutions, that it was possible to manage a
programme covering the three types of HEI despite this complex environment.
The SCIL criticism that the SVC Steering Committee did not have time for discussion and
definition of strategies, being overloaded by too many operational tasks needs also to be seen
in context for two reasons: firstly, one should consider the different tasks of the SVC-SC and the
fact that its members did it as a volunteer activity; secondly, there has been more strategic
thinking especially in smaller task-groups, for example concerning the eHub project. Our
appreciation is that the SVC-SC functioned relatively well given its working conditions.
The picture looks less positive concerning mandates and support services, which have been the
least productive part of the whole programme, if we take into account the funding volume of 4
mio. CHF.. Half of this amount has been devoted to technical support and to the national
content server. A posteriori, the decision to establish a national content server based on a
commercial product has revealed itself as not correct, even if one could understand the
motivations at that time (for example a number of projects using this platform) and that the
evolution towards open source was not foreseeable to this extent when the decision was taken.
It is clear also that this choice did not sufficiently take into account the impact of the introduction
of CCSPs and the shift towards the introduction of elearning as a basic service (meaning also
the need for a simpler LMS). A more positive aspect is that these activities laid the basis for the
hosting by Switch of some support services after the end of the SVC programme (eHub project).
The impact of the other mandates on the programme seems to have even less significance.
54