Evaluation of the Swiss Virtual Campus - Schweizerische ...

SVC Final Evaluation. Background Report Lepori and Probst
2 The SVC programme: general outline
The Swiss Virtual Campus (SVC) is the federal programme to diffuse the use of new education
technologies in Swiss higher education institutions (HEIs). It lasted nine years (1999-2008) with
a total federal funding of about 75 mio. CHF. It has been part of the so-called university
cooperation projects financed by the State Secretariat for Education and Research (SER) under
the new University Act and managed by the Swiss University Conference (SUC). It has been
co-funded by the Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology (OPET) for the
participation of Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) and by the Council of the Federal
Institutes of Technology (FIT) for the participation of the two FIT to the programme.
In this section, we briefly present the history and development of the SVC programme from its
creation in 1999; although the consolidation phase is the object of this evaluation, many of the
features of the programme can be understood only by looking at its whole development.
2.1 History and background
The SVC programme was launched in 1999 by a proposal of the SUC and of its planning
commission to promote the use of new information and communication technologies in the
Swiss HEI, following a number of studies and reports at the end of the 90’s showing that Swiss
HEI were slow in introducing these instruments in education activities (CUS 1996 and 1997).
Besides this general goal, the main initial focus of the programme was to produce digital
educational units which could be used by students of different institutions and recognized in
their curricula, hence the name of Swiss Virtual Campus (Conseil fédéral 1998). The overall
policy goals, as stated in the Research and Higher Education Message 2000-2003 of the
Federal government, were to promote the cooperation between HEIs, to promote innovation in
pedagogical methods and to produce high-quality educational materials. The programme was
part of the activities managed by the SUC under the University Act in order to promote
cooperation and modernization of the Swiss higher education system.
The so-called Impulse Programme in the years 2000-2003 was essentially focused on the
realisation of projects for the development of on-line educational modules in specific subjects; in
two calls for proposals, 50 projects were selected, covering almost all educational domains in
Swiss higher education institutions. The projects were realised by consortia of different
universities from a minimum of 3 partners up to a maximum of more than 10 partners for some
projects, including higher education institutions, research institutes, support services and private
companies. Projects were built as largely stand-alone teams including all the needed
competences for their realization in the specific educational subject, in pedagogy, technology
and design. Accordingly, the size of the projects was rather large, with an average federal
contribution of 600,000 CHF; some projects received more than 1 mio. CHF of federal funding
(plus the resources invested by the involved institutions; see the evaluation report of the
impulse phase for detailed data).
Overall, the Impulse Programme was financed by the Confederation with 30 mio. CHF for the
universities, 7 mio. CHF for the UAS and 2 mio. CHF for the FIT; about 34 mio. CHF have been
spent by the projects, the rest for the management of the programme and for specific support
mandates in organization, pedagogy and technology. To these funds, we should add the
matching funds for projects invested by the institutions themselves (at least the same amount
as the federal funding).
The evaluation of the impulse phase showed that the programme had been quite successful in
promoting new initiatives for the introduction of ICT in higher education and had created a
favourable environment for experimenting with e-learning in higher education (Gertsch, Perellon
and Weber 2004); moreover, specific competences were developed and many of the realised
educational modules were evaluated as being innovative and of quite good quality. During this
phase, it became progressively clear that the goal of developing shared educational modules
fully on-line was not well-adapted to the Swiss context, and, in practice, most projects shifted to
a blended-mode approach, where the use of electronic resources was closely integrated with
classroom work and therefore adapted by the course/teacher. A second concern was raised
about the consolidation of the developed competences after the end of the projects and about
their technical viability, since many projects were based on tools developed ad hoc (Lepori and
Rezzonico 2003) and there were fears that the projects were actually too closely linked to
individual people (with the risk of abandoning them for example in case of retirement of the
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