Evaluation of the Swiss Virtual Campus - Schweizerische ...

SVC Final Evaluation. Background Report Lepori and Probst
Overall, collaboration is rated well. But we can see that especially in some 3 rd and 4 th series
projects, it is also seen as a complication, or has only been limited. It might be that these issues
emerge in the 3 rd and 4 th series because these projects do not yet exist as long as 1 st and 2 nd
series projects, where probably a way of handling the collaboration has already been found (or
where project partners also have changed in the meantime). It is, however, interesting to see
that only 22 projects strongly disagree with the statement that collaboration was more a
complication in the work. Also during the monitoring visits, challenges have been reported: for
example the difficulty of reconciling different points of view or other duties of the project
members leading to delays in delivery.
One could expect that in 3 rd and 4 th series projects, due to the smaller overall partner numbers,
it was possible to develop better collaborations. This does, however, not hold true in our data:
The share of projects disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with the statement that collaboration
was limited (and thus saying that collaboration exists) remains more or less the same in the 1 st ,
2 nd and 3 rd and even decreases in the 4 th series.
Collaboration and exchange between projects from different teams, however, seems to be less
intensive. At the monitoring visits, several projects seemed not to know about other projects in
their own or a close domain (but at other HEIs), which could also be of interest to them. Thus,
exchange among projects of the same disciplinary fields could be an interesting tool for
extending the impact of the SVC programmes.
several times; 27
regular; 7
39
not existing; 24
once or twice; 21
Figure 10. ‘How frequent was your relationship with other SVC projects similar to yours?’
N =79
Overall, it appears that the SVC projects have been effective in promoting and reinforcing the
collaboration between higher education institutions and that in most of the projects this
collaboration was real and brought some benefits, even if, as some of the interviewed persons
underscored, it certainly made the management of the projects more difficult and increased their
costs.
4.4 Involvement of CCSP
Concerning the relationship between projects and CCSPs, we find two quite different situations:
the SVC established CCSPs only in the consolidation phase, thus most 1 st and 2 nd series
projects have originally been developed without the support of a CCSP, except in some places
where such structures already existed before the SVC programme. For 3 rd series projects,
involvement of the CCSP was mandatory and a fixed overhead for their services was included,
while for 4 th series projects CCSP leaders had to sign the application.
Some HEIs emphasised that the involvement of the CCSP allowed an internal selection of
projects so that those submitted were better designed than in the impulse phase and had a
higher chances of being used in education, thus helping their sustainability in the future.