Evaluation of the Swiss Virtual Campus - Schweizerische ...

SVC Final Evaluation. Background Report Lepori and Probst
6 Conclusions
Before coming to some concluding points, it is important to state that one should understand
some limitations of this report dictated by its original mandate. Namely, the report limits itself to
present the views and appreciations of the SVC coordination unit, of the directorates of the
higher education institutions and of the SVC projects, while we disregarded those of other
stakeholders like students (which have been included in the expert evaluation). Some biases
might emerge for this reason. At the same time, the objective of this work has been more to
understand the overall impact of the SVC programme on the development of elearning in Swiss
higher education, than to measure the efficiency of spending in an economic sense or to
compare the SVC with similar programmes abroad.
If we come back to the main questions of this evaluation – elearning strategies and CCSP,
sustainability of SVC projects, coordination and mandates – we get the following overview.
1) Firstly, during the SVC programme, most Swiss HEIs developed an elearning strategy and
established a support centre which will be further continued after the end of programme. Most
respondents in rectorates and CCSPs are confident in the future and stated that responsibility
for elearning can now be fully taken by the institutions themselves; they also agreed that in
many cases political pressure, financial support and coaching from the SVC gave a strong
impetus to this process. At the same time, a number of problematic cases emerged where the
CCSP is still in development or the situation is largely unclear.
In our opinion, support and promotion of CCSP has been the most successful part of the whole
programme and a solid heritage for the future development of elearning; also, most institutions
answered positively to this impetus and found well-adapted solutions for their context. The SVC
cannot be blamed for the few cases where, because of lack of institutional support or of difficult
internal or personnel constellations, a CCSP has not yet been established. It remains an open
issue to which extent some kind of monitoring and follow-up of CCSP should be organised, for
example in the framework of the CRUS, to avoid some institutions losing momentum.
2) Secondly, projects themselves see their future perspectives as rather positive and affirm that
the developed products are and will be used in education in most cases, even if lack of funding
might impair future developments. CCSP and monitoring visits give a more differentiated view,
where the projects which are based on standard technical solutions will be maintained, while
more innovative and niche projects will have more difficulties. Overall, both sides see the
collaboration between projects and CCSP as very positive and well-functioning. It is also stated
that projects will also be used in the future by partners and not only by the leading house and,
overall, the collaboration between different institutions has been judged as positive (even if
resource- and time-consuming).
Our opinion is that it would be incorrect to affirm that most of the SVC projects will just die after
the end of federal funding, but that their outcome might be quite different from that foreseen at
the beginning, especially for the 1 st and 2 nd series projects which were clearly aimed at
developing fully on-line courses. It is likely that, with the exception of few projects, in most cases
their impact will be more in the renewal of educational practices than in the development of
widely used products and, in this respect, the decision to reduce funding levels quite
considerably in the 3 rd and 4 th series has been seen as correct.
3) Finally, the steering and management of the programme has been generally appreciated,
while the mandates clearly had a lower impact, largely because of the additional functions
assumed by the CCSPs. Especially, the choice to establish a national LMS based on a
commercial system revealed itself a posteriori as not adequate because of the stronger role
assumed by the LMS adopted by a CCSP, of the development of open source software and
technical problems with the adopted system.
Our opinion is that these choices have to be considered in the context of the time when they
were taken, but that it is correct to question if the rather large amount spent for mandates (4
mio. CHF) could not have been spent better. In the whole context of the programme, however,
this seems to us to be a rather minor point.
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