In the spring of 2000, Stockholm's School of Economics (SSE) was ranked, for the first time, in the Financial Times rankings for higher education. The SSE Executive Education placed 19th in the world and 9th in Europe. With the strategic focus of the school to get increasingly inclined towards the international market, it was a natural step to visit and investigate how the American partner schools have integrated IT in education and find out what the general trends are. The universities that we visited were Harvard, MIT, Babson College, Columbia, New York University, Columbia, Cornell, The Wharton School of Business, Duke, UNC at Chapel Hill, UC Berkeley and Stanford. In addition, we met with Dr. William Graves (Chairman and founder of the eLearning company Eduprise); Heinrich Koenen (Vice President, The Masie Center) and Robert Johansen (President, Institute for the Future).

Since we have limited space to share our findings, we will highlight some of our general findings contributing to success in the eLearning arena. If you would like more information, please visit our website at CLICK: http://www.usa2000.nu where we have published information about the different universities. Many of our findings have been discussed in other articles and are therefore not new. However, we believe that the factors below are important:

1. Development of a Clear and Integrated Strategy
One consistent observation made during the interviews was that very few actors in the learning space seem to have clear strategies. Several seem to be afraid of lagging behind, missing the train and ending up left out, which tempts many to jump into eLearning without a clear, pre-set strategy just to have presence in the field. Naturally, a clear strategy facilitates a successful mastering of the path. However, a lot is to be gained if this strategy is incorporated into the overall strategy of the school and is not kept isolated.

Duke has a business model that separates them a bit from many of the other schools. Instead of focusing only on the executive level, their goal is to be able to provide knowledge to all levels of management, using a mix of both traditional face-to-face learning and eLearning. Their approach is that the knowledge is trapped within the organization and their role is to become knowledge-facilitators.

2. Support from the Dean and the University Board of Directors An articulated support from the dean and the university board of directors creates a solid foundation for further development. The lowest level of engagement, which for reluctant faculty otherwise would be nonexistent, can be centrally set and incentives presented inspiring to go further. It is important to try not to force faculty, but rather offer full support and rewards for those who want to and can produce sound solutions. The somehow contradictory statement, to set a lowest level, but not force people, should be viewed as a way to overcome the initial threshold new technologies or pedagogical methods infer. When the threshold has been passed, faculty can decide on their own involvement.

We believe that Cornell, Duke and Columbia has been successful in this matter. At Cornell and Duke, for-profit ventures have been created to separate the traditional academia from the entities producing eLearning content. At Columbia, Dean Meyer Feldman has actively and decisively supported the school's partnership with Unext.

3. Design Department for Creation of Courses
Course design personnel and IT-administrators are not interchangeable. The designing of courses is a specialized skill and personnel skilled in that field are an extremely valuable resource. A consistent comment from the authorities we met throughout our journey was that eLearning has a lot of potential and offers an enormous flora of pedagogical possibilities, but at the moment there isn't much good material produced. Many institutions just tape lectures, put up some slides and a questionnaire, which others say shouldn't be worth calling eLearning. This has almost unanimously been regarded as insufficient and, at best, considered as a first trembling step. The lack of interactivity in the current solutions is striking. It is here that course designers are critical. Pedagogical ability, technical know-how and design skills are highly desirable, which (except for technical know-how) aren't necessarily required for IT-administrators. The course designers must be able to communicate with the professors in an effective way to combine the respective proficiencies. The synergistic potential of technology, pedagogy and content blended together is enormous.

Alison Peirce at Wharton presented a good analogy comparing film-making of books with transforming classroom education into eLearning. She emphasized that it has been extremely hard to turn good books into good movies, because books and films are two different media. We believe that this is the case in the educational sphere too, and it is therefore crucial to distinguish IT-administrators from course designers.

4. Good Communication With the Professors
A good method for quick results, is to identify professors who like the medium. Through giving them solid support, resources and time, a lot can be accomplished in a short period of time. Through information seminars, roundtable discussions and similar events, the motivation can be spread. Then when the next cadre of interested faculty comes around, they will be provided with help to more swiftly and easily produce a test-course.

In this matter we consider the strategy Jonathan Levy (Harvard Business School Publishing) presented very interesting. When formerly at Cornell, he focused on teachers who came on their own initiative for help and instructions to create online courses. They were given more than sufficient support to minimize friction from technology-related matters, liberating time for them to work on content and pedagogy.

NYU is also on the right track with its management group. This is responsible for, among other things, giving faculty IT-support in the development of online courses.

For more on our project, CLICK: http://www.usa2000.nu. If you have comments, please send us an e-mail at: 18184@hhss.se