That, in a short time, technology has shaken the foundations of human activity is obvious. Also of education. Just look back and remember what happened, for example, a quarter of a century ago in Spain. In 1995, the same year that Windows 95, DVD and MP3 were born, in our country there were not even laptops; the mobile phone was an extravagance within the reach of few pockets (barely 2.5% of the population had it); and the internet was beginning to take its first steps through InfoVía, a connection through the telephone copper line.
In that context of digital prehistory, a unique and pioneering university in the world was launched in Barcelona at that time.
His proposal was totally disruptive: he renounced face-to-face classes and based his distance education model on an incipient virtual campus that, together with email, facilitated the learning process and communication between students and teachers.
Núria Cerezuela, graduated from the first class of Psychopedagogy at the Open University of Catalonia. Personal file
The project of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) seemed an extravagance at that time: a 100% digital bet conceived in the possibilities of the Internet and in the personalization and accompaniment of the student through virtual learning (what is now known as
e -learning).
Even so, 206 students enrolled in Psychopedagogy and Business Studies, the only two approved degrees offered by the UOC at the time, both in Catalan.
25 years have passed since those first classes.
Today the UOC has 25 bachelor's degrees, 54 university master's degrees, 77,500 students and is present outside of Catalonia with regional headquarters spread across Spain and several countries.
An unstoppable process for a new mindset
These figures demonstrate the extent to which technology has changed the paradigm of higher education. Since 2000, the number of students studying remotely has multiplied by 900% worldwide. Unesco itself admits that one of the reasons that has contributed to this growth is the use of technological tools, which have improved access to university studies. The process is already unstoppable.
Experts agree that the university of the future will have little to do with the one we know today.
Almost everything will be different: from the methodology to the way of teaching, the communications with the teachers, the type of subjects, the way of evaluating and even the profile of the students and the skills they will learn in the classrooms, many of them virtual .
A profound change that implies a new mentality.
In the process, universities will have to reformulate their reason for being.
Students' progress can be measured and studies tailored to their individual needs
Some clues about how this institution will be in the 21st century: Except for those institutions in which virtuality is already 100% established, presence will not disappear completely in the rest, although most of the classes will be remote; Students' progress can be measured and studies adapted to their individual needs thanks to the data collected from each student - what is known as
learning analytics.
-; the educational formats and resources will be more multimedia, with a greater presence of podcasts and videos, and the classes will be more interactive, based on active learning, with more participatory students and a new role of a teacher-mentor who will supervise and correct the works. Everything will be less corseted, with virtual classrooms increasingly multicultural and diverse in which students from different parts of the planet will coincide.
“Microconferences given by well-known international guests will be common, as technology will make it easier for experts from around the world to share their experiences through short webinars”, predicts from Norway the head of the Nordic Open Online Academy, Morten F. Paulsen .
The ability to share learning resources, information and knowledge between teachers and students will enrich all parties, Paulsen continues.
Furthermore, at that university to come, textbooks - "expensive, bulky and sometimes difficult to get," says Olsen - will be distributed in digital format through a kind of Spotify focused on publishing.
The danger of the digital divide
For that not-so-distant future to be a reality, connectivity is essential. It is essential that citizens, including the students of tomorrow, can connect to the Internet at any time of the day and wherever they are, no matter how remote and inaccessible the place where they are. The extension of fiber optics, and especially the deployment of 5G technology, will be a turning point.
In the opinion of the consultant of the Spanish Association for Digitization (DigitalES), Javier Miranda, the effort of the main operators and the State itself to guarantee the best connections will ensure the access of the entire population to the network.
"But that is not enough," he warns.
Because in the future it will no longer be enough to have a mobile phone or a computer with which to connect.
“The large volume of data that we are going to handle means that we will need very powerful devices.
They must have sufficient capacity so that the quality of the information we receive is optimal ”, he argues.
“Ending this digital divide that affects technology is vital”, agrees the Rector of the UOC, Josep A. Planell.
Social skills and continuous training
But there is much more. Along with purely academic knowledge, students will acquire other types of
soft skills
related to qualities such as teamwork, creativity, communication or gender policy, which are essential to carry out the jobs of the future. This will change the way you evaluate. And beyond degrees and masters, very specific short courses of continuous training tailored will be taught for professionals with work experience, who will continue training to increase their skills, improve their curriculum or recycle their career.
“New technologies have allowed us to change the rules of the game. Those universities that take advantage of all the technological opportunities and successfully transfer them to certain disciplines such as biology and medicine may have a competitive advantage in the research niche ”, predicts the coordinator of the Online Training and Educational Technologies group of the Rectors Conference of Spanish Universities (CRUE), Pedro Ruiz.
For his part, the Rector of the UOC, Josep A. Planell, insists that the university must transform itself internally towards a data governance in which all the actors and departments involved (professors, students, alumni, support staff , administration) are aligned in digitization. "There can be no isolated silos, but the technology will be transversal to the entire institution and will be present in all the decisions made," he says.
A transformative effort that goes beyond buying certain
software
or providing people with tablets or mobiles.
“This means changing the mentality of the institutions, it is not enough to reproduce the scheme of presence and transfer it to the digital world.
Everything will have to be rethought ”, he insists.
Huge challenges that require courageous decisions for the university to maintain its reason for being in the future and increase its social impact in the formation of free, critical and democratic citizens.
Núria and Eulàlia, the pioneers of the online university
“We studied in a very basic virtual environment. The material we received was almost all textual, in PDF formats and, from time to time, a video. Connections to the network were very slow, the Internet was underdeveloped ”. This is how Núria Cerezuela (in the image), who graduated from the first class of Psychopedagogy at the UOC, remembers her first experience with digital and distance education. In a time when the cloud did not exist and it was not possible to participate in the network, students worked in a very artisanal way. "We did not have the tools that exist now, everything took longer," he acknowledges.
Eulàlia Hernández, professor of Psychology and Educational Sciences in that first year, even attended a practical workshop to understand what the Internet was a few weeks before starting at the UOC. “People neither used it nor believed in its possibilities. Nor was the culture of continuous training established ”, he explains. Since no one thought that you could learn in a digital university, the first year there were two face-to-face classes. "All teachers had to learn to communicate effectively virtually and in the right tone," he adds.