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As of August 1st, 2008, the Edutech web site will no longer be updated. Edutech was funded by the Swiss Virtual Campus programme, which ended on July 31st, 2008. Some activities will be taken over by the e-Learning Services group at the SWITCH foundation.

Survey Executive Summary

e-Learning Online Software Requirements of Swiss Higher Education Institutions

Use of Online Software

• There is a great variety of online software used in Swiss Institutions.
• WebCT CE is still the LMS being used very widely (approx. 20'000 students).
• The use of Open Source products (Moodle, Claroline, ILIAS, OLAT) is rather increasing. The use of WebCT Campus Edition is rather decreasing. At the moment it is hard to predict how stable this development will be ("Trend or Hype?").
• There is a clear preference for Open Source products (13 institutions compared with 5 institutions who prefer commercial products). For 1/3 of the institutions other criteria such as cost or quality are more important in their software selection.

Hosting Demand

• 13 institutions are interested in outsourcing a part of their e-learning software portfolio. The expectation is that centralized services are robust, readily available and economically advantageous. Some institutions do have concrete needs.
• As service provider, SWITCH at a national level is preferred by 11 institutions. 6 institutions would use or are already using hosting from other higher education institutions.
• There is a demand for LMS hosting, conferencing software and repositories (10-12), but also hosting concerning testing (5).
• Hosting demand concentrates on technical hosting and support for competence centers (10-12). 5-7 institutions are interested in comprehensive hosting.
• Many institutions are hesitating to make binding statements, because there is still lacking experience with using outsourced services for this type of software. Institutions fear that centralized services might lead to more difficult decision procedures because of diverging interests of partners.

National services are expected to be funded at a national level. About ¼ of the institutions are worried that a national initiative could take away funds from local development. They prefer to spend their funds locally in the own institution.

Institutions are asking for possibilities to regularly exchange experiences, software tools, and didactical concepts. More inter-institutional transparency is requested.

Hosting Offer

• 6-10 institutions with different hosting capacities are interested in offering hosting services for a wide range of products to other institutions.
• They are generally open to allow smaller projects of other institutions to use existing software at a low scale for free - without guaranteeing the availability of the service.
• Three institutions are already offering paid services under a service level agreement(SLA). The rest (3-7) would be willing to negotiate hosting terms.

For more specific results please refer to the survey details.