Universities must have the courage to invest in new educational technologies and replace older disciplines, a senior EU official told a European education conference in Limerick. He also said tighter funding would lead to some "privatisation" of university teaching.
Dr Marc Durando, head of the European Commission's Socrates and Youth Technical Assistance Office, was addressing the conference of the Association for Teacher Education in Europe conference at Mary Immaculate College yesterday. The conference is part-sponsored by The Irish Times.
He said that given the elimination of borders and the accessibility to education provided by new education technologies, universities must decide which "disciplines of excellence" they wished to focus on and into which they wished to channel tightening resources.
They needed to decide what would happen to their "secondary" disciplines, not by abandoning them altogether but by sharing them with other institutions, tendering them out to distance-learning providers, and dropping certain subjects.
Mr Durando said that in today's society lifelong learning - education throughout a person's life - was not an option, but a necessity. The pace of change made concepts such as permanent retraining, continuing training, and developing parallel skills particularly important.
In universities, there was a stark discrepancy between the lip service paid to life-long learning and the reality.
He urged universities to do more to teach people "how to learn". Mr Durando was critical of universities' evaluation procedures. He said they often took up to nine months to prepare and a year to discuss, and then were shelved with nothing being done about them.
He stressed the need for change in the training of both academic and administrative staff, so that expertise in new technologies would become an integral part of their career ladders.
He noted: "With few exceptions, European universities do not encourage their teaching staff to integrate modern technologies into their instruction." Resistance to change by university staff was one of the main obstacles to investment in this vital area.
"Henceforth, institutions of higher education have no alternative to investing both human and financial resources in these information technologies," Mr Durando said. He suggested regional resource centres which would allow institutions to have access to technologies which they could otherwise not afford, and would avoid duplication of resources.
He also stressed the importance of new alliances, both locally with industry and internationally through EU programmes like Socrates.