2.1 RESEARCH

A recent study[7] - carried out in the context of a National Research Programme called "The Effectiveness of Swiss Education Systems" - presented a detailed analysis of research work in the educational use of new technologies.

The authors note that most research in the field of learning technologies in Switzerland is carried out in universities and in small pedagogical research centres run by local authorities. The latter are dependant on local educational authorities and often suffer from a lack of exchange with fundamental research work going on in universities. As for universities, there is little research on learning technologies done in the Humanities. There is however a great deal of in-house R&D in multimedia educational software in university departments scattered all over Switzerland. A wide range of research themes related to learning technologies are covered in Switzerland with a result that none of the areas really attains the critical mass necessary to be viably present on an international level. The authors studied seven different areas of research in Switzerland:

1. Software evaluation, based on long-standing methods and requiring very little infrastructure, was the most developed of all research areas.
2. Testing learning and teaching models was an underdeveloped area of research probably due to the high cost involved in creating and testing models. However this area produced many publications.
3. Changing educational practices and contents - a traditional educational sciences research theme related to pedagogical innovation and a psycho-sociological approach to school phenomena. The authors attribute the relative lack of research publications in this field to difficulties in finding reliable, controllable fields of experimentation.
4. Conception and development of computer assisted learning (CAL) - the authors found a large number of groups scattered all over Switzerland working in this field, few of whom however came from educational sciences. The authors found this state of affairs symptomatic of the split between software developers and potential users. As a result of this situation, those working in R&D set up workgroups about specific problems unaware that these had already been treated elsewhere by educational sciences.
5. Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and distance learning - a relatively underdeveloped area in Switzerland although some research is being carried out on applications at a university level (See next section "Swiss Universities").
6. Problems related to the introduction of computers - mainly involving studies carried out on a local basis for local educational authorities. The large number of studies carried out in this area is due to the federal system in which each canton is responsible for it own educational matters.
7. Specialised educational use - a certain amount of research work is being done in the use of new technologies in the field of learning by the physically and mentally handicapped.

[7] Les nouvelles technologies de l'information appliquées à la formation, Mendelsohn P. & Jerman P., NRP33/TECFA, Berne/Geneva, To be published.