The main objective of the project is to develop and implement a complex integrated University Management Information System at universities of Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Georgia, on the basis of European experience. To reach this goal, it is necessary to solve the following tasks:
- adapting to NIS countries’ conditions of EU experience and approaches on design and use of integrated information management systems.
- development of guidance on the principles of composition and effective use of integrated information management systems.
- providing a high quality training and retraining courses for different categories of university administrators in the following fields: general computer literacy; IT management; theory and practice of strategic planning; e-government and modern information management technologies; etc.
- to design and implement a new integrated software for university management on the base of information flows analysis, and existing university management systems at partner universities (including creation of few divisionsassigned to support the following service functions of the information system: computer network administration; database administration; servicing information systems; design, maintenance and adaptation of software).
At the start of the project it will be necessary to integrate information about university management in the EU higher education system, observe state of use of the information management and ERP technologies in EU education area.Experience on the day-to-day education management and management of the total university life cycle of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Koblenz-Landau University and University of Le Mans will be analyzed and integrated. The group of leading employees of the NIS universities will visit the EU universities for a short retraining programme. Then the current state of university information management at the partner universities will be analyzed. Propositions for their optimisation will be developed. Professors of the EU universities, in cooperation with NIS specialists, will elaborate the model of a new integrated university management system, prepare a requirement specification for the corresponding software.
Project Academic Council will be established. It will consist of representatives of the all consortium members (1 person per organisation). Main objective of the Academic Council will be preparation of a Strategic Plan of improvement of the University Information Management System. At SSU will be carried out a conference of the Academic Council, to discuss and affirmation of the Strategic Plan. Then, the Academic Council will carry out the selection of IT-specialists, academic and administrative staff of the participating universities (skilled in information technologies or management) for retraining on university management at the EU universities. Selection criteria will be their IT skills and their language proficiency. For the selected staff will be organised two-month European languages courses (English, German, etc.) After the language courses, selected staff will participate in 1-month courses at EU universities on Information Technologies, ERP and E-government Technologies, Information Management, etc. The participants will accept European experience in University Information Management Systems. At home universities the retrained groups’ members will organise special seminars for colleagues, to share gained knowledge. During the seminars the retrained project participants will have an opportunity to present the draft model of the future Integrated University Information Management System. All comments and recommendations of university colleagues will be discussed and taken into consideration for the further development. The Academic Councils together with colleagues from the Ministries of Education will develop and publish a report on ways of improvement of IT support of university management. The main part of the report will be a Strategic Plan of integration and development of the University Information Management System. The documents have to be adapted to Ukrainian, Belorusian, Georgian and Moldovan conditions, as a whole, and based on analysis of the conditions of the partner countries universities, in particular. Necessary equipment will be selected and purchased to organise the work places for the staff of IT-centres at the partner countries universities.
Just after the start of the project, web-sites of the IT-centers will be designed and put in the Internet. ITGIS will give all consultations in IT area and will be responsible for web-site. First versions will include initial information about the ITcentres and plans of its development. Then the web-sites will be maintained and developed. They should reflect all new data about activities of the IT-Centres. After opening the IT-centres, administrative staff representatives of each IT-centre will be selected for further training on Information Management at the EU universities. 2 persons from each IT-centre will be training at each Euuniversity. The selected staff, during retraining at EU universities, will improve their skills in practical information management and ERP technologies.
After their return to the NIS countries, the retrained IT-centres staff of the partner countries universities will form a programming network, which will design an Integrated University Management Information System under general supervision of UKOLD. The Information System will be developed as an instrument for collection and automatic analysis of all the university data. Computer laboratories will be arranged for the System development. The Information System is expected to become a framework for installing information management system and to support:
- Information about students, their study progress and success rates;
- Planning the education process cycle;
- Education quality control and assurance;
- Automation of university document circulation.
The new software will be partly formed from the software, used at the NIS and EU partner universities, and partly designed by the retrained staff of the Centres. The new developed system will be installed and implemented in the middle of the second project year. As a result, part university management processes will be reorganised. Courses for permanent retraining of university administrative staff will be prepared and implemented. Teachers from the partner countries universities , skilled both in computer science and theory of management will be selected and retrained at MCSU and UKOLD. They will prepare several new courses for the retraining curriculum. All necessary for the preparation and teaching: modern teaching equipment (whiteboards, media projectors, etc.) and literature will be purchased. The curriculum will be elaborated on the base of similar courses at the EU universities, adapted to the special needs of the partner universities.
The curriculum, as well as syllabi of all the courses, will be evaluated by the Academic Council after the first retraining cycle. On the base of this experience a final version of the syllabi and a package of teaching materials, including translation and adaptation of existing EU universities materials, will be developed and approved by the Academic Council. Bilateral agreements between the participating universities will be signed concerning further exchange and coordination of the teaching materials. First courses will be organized at the partner countries universities for representatives of university administrations.
As a dissemination action, the web-site with information about developed Universty Information Management System and the curriculum will be designed and presented in the Internet. Consortium members, teachers and staff of ITCenters will present the developed Universty Information Management System at partner country universities in order to share information about its concept, functioning, new possibilities, providing for university administrators. The University Information Management System will be presented in public agencies of the Partner Countries. Project participants, under leadership of the ministries’ representatives, will prepare agreements with the Ministries of Education about official status of University Information Management System and its distribution over the partner country universities. University Information Management System will get accreditation in all the participating NIS countries. An International Association for Universty Information Management in Higher Education will be organised on the base of the participating partner countries’ universities.
Semiannual project coordination meetings will take place. The TNU experts’ reports will beprepead annually and consider during the coordination meetings. Recommendations and estimations of the expert, materials of the coordination meetings, the analytical project documentation, annual and final reports, responses in the project web-site, other documents will be collected and taken into thorough consideration. Quality control and monitoring of the project will be carried out by a special sub-division of the Academic Council on the base of European standards implementation measures. It wiil use for assessment especially prepared questionnaires for participants. All meetings of consortium members will be used for coordination purposes. Most of coordination will be done electronically (by e-mail, via the project website and, if necessary, by telephone). This proved more than sufficient in earlier TEMPUS projects.