6. Summary of Key Issues

191. This paper has identified many issues which need to be addressed in order to ensure information systems and IT can be fully exploited in the higher education community to help meet the considerable pressures on, and engender beneficial change in, the sector over the next five to ten years.

• The need to expand the "reach" of the network to the home and workplace and to strengthen links with industry and other education sectors.
• The need to provide adequate multi-media personal workstations for faculty and student use. (Section 4.1)
• The need to engender the necessary culture change and training to support the preparation of multimedia teaching material and electronic text book and research material. (Section 4.1)
• The need to promote and improve the exploitation of IT in the creation of virtual laboratories for teaching and research use. (Section 4.2)
• The need to provide high quality data banks of research material for effective analysis. (Section 4.2)
• The need to prove technology and engender the necessary culture change to improve electronic information delivery and the development of the virtual library. (Section 4.3)
• The need to make greater use of information systems to achieve the effective management of higher education institutions. This includes security, environmental and access control, management and executive information systems, data security and authentication and specialist applications for timetabling and the management of accommodation and catering etc. (Section 4.5)
• Needed elements of an emerging agenda to fully integrate information technology into higher education have been identified at four levels, namely: national, institutional, staff and student. including the need for a national coordination and funding body, the need for planning within each university, the need for training of teaching staff and the need to address the support crisis and last but not least the needs of students. (Section 5)

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