Evaluation of the Swiss Virtual Campus - Schweizerische ...

SVC Final Evaluation. Background Report Lepori and Probst
cases, funding has been mostly agreed on a project basis for the next 2-3 years and not as a
basic recurrent funding.
3.5 Services offered
A look at the services offered by CCSP shows a clear picture: namely, with very few exceptions,
CCSPs focus their strategy on offering basic services and consultancy to a wide audience of
teachers, instead of developing products for a few curricula. CCSPs have thus made the
transition from a technology and product-based approach to elearning to an approach oriented
to the improvement of (face-to-face) education even with simple services (for example, a
number of CCSPs offer basic consultancy such as on the didactically correct use of
PowerPoint). Some CCSP leaders explicitly praised this approach and emphasised the strong
difference with this approach from many SVC projects (especially in the 1 st and 2 nd series).
It appears that this orientation was functional to reach a much wider diffusion of elearning
activities in education: in some institutions more than half of the courses already make use of a
LMS (even if, in most cases, for simple activities like delivering documents and communication
internal to the course). In this respect, the adoption of simpler LMS oriented towards support to
face-to-face education rather than to the development of high-end products was quite important.
Other delivered services include, in detail:
• an overall activity of dissemination of elearning, including the organisation of workshops,
courses and face-to-face consultancy, both concerning didactics and technological aspects;
• the introduction and maintenance of a university-wide LMS; as shown before, most CCSPs
adopted an open-source LMS, with Moodle being the most common choice. In a number of
HEIs (for example UZH, UNISG, USI and SUPSI), most of the courses are already
managed through the LMS and focus is now on shifting towards selectively developing
more advanced uses of the platform;
• management and advice on other technical instruments and on media production (in some
cases the network integrated a specialised centre for these services); and
• management of internal calls for proposals and support for these projects. In most cases,
these are rather small-scale projects promoting didactical innovation at the level of
individual courses.
Support and production for the SVC projects has been quite important for the few CCSPs which
had many projects, but overall it has not been the main focus. CCSPs with a large number of
SVC projects developed guidelines on how they will be supported after the end of federal
funding, indicating which services are included in their basic activities and which ones (for
example development of multimedia) require additional funding. Overall, CCSP leaders were
quite confident that at least the maintenance of these projects can be ensured with available
resources; however, some open questions concern the service towards project partners (for
example for updating contents or managing students accounts).
3.6 A final appreciation
In our opinion, the support and coaching provided by CCSPs has been a successful activity of
the SVC programme, thanks also to the active engagement of most HEIs. Thus, the SVC
support was decisive to move from a situation where, at the beginning of the Consolidation
Programme, just a few HEIs had internal elearning centres to a situation where this is the case
in most of them. The introduction of CCSPs was also clearly decisive for the diffusion of
elearning in Swiss HEI and thus to reach the original SVC goal. Except for a few cases, the
assessment of the services of CCSP by the rectorates and the SVC projects gives a positive
picture.
From the information we collected, the main issue which needs to be addressed concerns the
large differences between institutions: in some of them not only the CCSP has been
established, but a basic use of a LMS has been generalised to most courses and more
advanced applications are being introduced. Thus, in these institutions elearning has become
an integral part of education. On the contrary, in some other institutions elearning is used mostly
by some enthusiastic people and the role and existence of the CCSP are not assured. Overall,
the situation is more difficult in UAS because of the decentralized structure of most of these
institutions and of on-going reorganisation processes which, in some UAS, make more difficult
the development of central strategies and structures. Even if federal funding will no longer be
available and the development of elearning will now be the responsibility of individual
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