Managing services connected to new educative technologies in a medium size university

Abstract

We aim at showing how the generalisation of the access to the Internet in a medium-size university (about 20,000 students, a faculty of 800 and some 300 technical and administrative staff) has influenced the everyday life of students and personnel. The different facilities of the University are spread out in several different sites in Nancy and its suburbs with some offshoots in other towns of the Lorraine region. The user base varies in its academic levels and computer literacy, as one may expect with computer specialists on the one hand, and common end users in the Humanities or Law on the other. The main goal of the so-called "Internet for All" project was to provide everybody in the University with basic utilities like email and web-browsing, and with resources like the catalogues of the University Library and its documentation centres, assistance for professional integration, distance learning and retrieving information from interactive terminals. Accessing such contents would not be possible otherwise because of the distance between sites (up to 50 Kilometres). There is a major question to address: what kind of specific services are to be developed in order to satisfy student expectations? We plan to detail in the paper the new service we propose to students and teachers within the University a platform to provide all the students with materials related to the courses they follow and the teachers with facilities to publish various materials, such as reports, notes, exercises or anything else they think helpful for their students. There are two kinds of documents: those useful for all the students (they are freely accessible) and those only accessible to the members of a given curriculum. This paper will present an overview of this project and its deployment.