Study Trip

Report - ETH Zurich Study Tour
This report summarizes the information we gathered during the study trip. For every visited organization we give a short summary of the content of the discussions. We summarize our strongest impressions and what we learned. As reference we give a list of the participants to the study trip and the program of our visits. Finally we close the report with the questions we sent to the hosting organizations to help us in defining our new ICT Strategy.
Report_Study_Tour_ETHZ.pdf.

In November 2004, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) organized a study trip to leading universities and research labs in the USA and Canada to learn about best practices in the use of information and telecommunication technologies (ICT) to support teaching, learning, research and services.

Our group was composed of 16 persons: professors and leading managers of the ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. These persons are actively involved in two important activities of ETH Zurich:

• ETH World – ETH World is a program to develop and introduce technologies for communication and cooperation independent of time and place. The program supports all members of ETH Zurich in their core business – teaching, learning, research and the associated management tasks.
• Definition of a global ICT Strategy – ETH Zurich is developing a global strategy for the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education, research and services. This strategy was submitted for rewiew by the ETH community in Janauary 2005.

Our study trip had the following purpose:

• Learn how similar institutions use ICT (best practices)
• Get input for the definition of the ICT Strategy for ETH Zurich
• Gather further suggestions how to improve the impact of ETH World
• Share and discuss our experiences with similar organizations
• Get input on how to build a environment for synchronous, interactive distant teaching (special interest of University of Zurich)

The visited organizations were (chronological order):

• University of British Columbia, Vancouver
• Silicon Chalk, Vanvoucer
• Xten Corporation, Vancouver
• Microsoft Corporation and Microsoft Research, Redmond
• University of California, Berkeley
• The Internet Archive, San Francisco
• Linden Lab (Second Life), San Francisco
• swissnex, San Francisco
• Logitech, Fremont
• Institute for the Future IFTF, Menlo Park
• Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning SCIL, Stanford
• Google, Mountain View
• Stanford University, Stanford
• The Computer History Museum, Mountain View

We summarize our overall impression from the study trip as follows:

• ETH Zurich can compete with its peers regarding infrastructure, strategic goals, planning, projects and ICT support.
• All visited organizations share similar problems but have different approaches on how to solve them.
• One of the aspects where we are lacking is in a more effective use of ICT for e-Learning (penetration of a few percent at ETH Zurich compared to up to 30% at other universities).
• We have to communicate our strengths in a better, more offensive way. We have to sell what we do and the high standards we have.
• Our peers tend to follow a more pragmatic approach, going for simple solutions that can be realized with a reasonable effort. At the ETH Zurich we tend to target the perfect solution, and spend too much time to get there.
• We were able to verify that the new ICT Strategy for ETH Zurich corresponds to best practices. This double check confirmed that we are on the right way. Aspects not covered so fare were integrated in the draft document.
• Our hypothesis about the importance of institutions like ETH World in other universities were confirmed: Similar organizations are needed in a university to promote advanced or unconventional uses of ICT. The impact of ETH World inside ETH Zurich seems to be at least so good as the impact of our peer organizations.

The support we received during the preparation of the trip and during the trip itself from the representative of ETH in the SF Bay area, Amy Ambrose at swissnex, proved to be essential to the success of our mission.

We would like to thank all hosting organizations. We experienced a warm welcome everywhere. We had open discussions with our peers and learned much. We hope we will have an opportunity to host any one interested in knowing more about ETH Zurich or University of Zurich.