Remains that the fantasy of the alldigital actually lived

With just one click, access to the best lessons from architecture, biology, or medicine. On the other, a wide choice of materials: downloadable courses, reading cards, videos, and even podcasts... The palette of (free) benefits available to students by the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was what let dream more than a French academic. Tri campus are far from reaching that degree of development education at distance. And for cause, the first calls for tender launched six years ago had not triggered dynamics. The granting of new credits, three years ago, has relaunched the process. The campus began to develop online courses to try to keep afloat in the international competition (hunting to the best students and teachers, course publications...). But "it has not reached a cruising speed", admits to National Education, stressing that the advances are disparate depending on the courses and universities.

In fact, only a few institutions have developed online courses and new digital tools. Most of the universities of law, in the French legal digital University, for example offer students license courses. Eleven schools of the network engineers ParisTech (including Polytechnique and the Ecole National supérieure de arts and crafts) opened the free knowledge site in January 2006. The prestigious Ecole normale supérieure has also updated the diapason. Its site is une showcase of excellence, offering "We do not want to create a simple tool of the international advertising," said Juliette Roussel, responsible of the project in the ass." The aim is to invent a new way to teach and recover French students who turn increasingly to the Anglo-Saxon formations.

A "complement".

Remains that the fantasy of the all-digital actually lived. Today, the tool is more modestly proposed as a "complement" to the presence in the classroom as a total substitute. "Digital cannot replace human contact." "On the other hand, it enrich it", explained Bernard Michon, Vice President of the University Strasbourg-II and head of the Open University of the humanities, one of the seven hexagonal digital campus. Indeed, few are students who stays within the single learning online. At the University of Maine (Le Mans), if 7 of students are enrolled in lessons at distance, "50 to 90 of them do use digital that in addition to the face-to-face", said Guillaume Hu, responsible for the pole digital resources.

Major difficulties

If the digital revolution has not yet taken place in university education, it is that it was facing some major difficulties. Few teachers-researchers are ready to assume the role of "virtual tutor", or training first, but mostly because these additional tasks are not included in the count of their working time (192 annual hours), or even of their remuneration. From a legal point of view, they are also reluctant to the idea of their courses online, without be protected by copyright. What many spend time to index and work a course available online free of charge when its publication would bring finance Finally, some fear that the pooling of the course are exposed to criticism of their colleagues. The University of Brittany lifted this brake offering courses developed collectively by the teachers. But, in reality, most institutions are limited to complement lectures by bibliographies or detailed online plans.