The CYD Ranking, which assesses Spanish universities on the basis of performance indicators, has just been published. According to this study, the UOC has moved up several places compared with last year's study and has been given the best score in six of these indicators. In particular, highly cited publications, international faculty and spin-offs were stand-out areas. The ranking also confirms that the UOC is the top online university in knowledge transfer. This ranking includes 87% of the 82 universities in Spain that offer bachelor’s degrees, of which 50 are public and 32 are private.
The UOC obtained three of the seven high-performance indicators linked with knowledge transfer; specifically, it has green lights in licence revenues, spin-offs and lifelong learning revenues, putting it at the top of the distance education universities in knowledge transfer. This milestone reflects the work done by the University in recent years to create closer cooperation ties between business enterprises, other universities and R&I entities, in line with the third objective that all universities must achieve: knowledge and technology transfer.
In this year's ranking, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya obtained six high-performance indicators. In addition to the three indicators obtained in knowledge transfer, it also gained an indicator in research, with a very good position in the ranking regarding highly cited publications. This indicator measures the proportion of publications among the 10% most cited.
The other two high-performance indicators refer to international faculty, which measures the ratio of non-Spanish teaching and research staff with respect to the total number of academics, and the regional publications. It is also worth highlighting that the UOC is the only online university that does not have any indicator in the low-performance group. Only 14 of the 73 universities analysed in the ranking have no low-performance indicators in research.
The study also concludes that the five autonomous regions with most high-performance indicators are, in alphabetical order, Basque Country, Catalonia, Madrid, Navarre and Valencia. The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona obtained the highest performance score in 24 of the 34 indicators evaluated.
The UOC works to ensure that the rankings take into account the online universities' specific features
The UOC contributes to improving the online universities' presence in the rankings through the CODUR project, a European project led by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. The objectives of the project are twofold: create a proposed list of indicators for online education that enable quality criteria to be set, and create guidelines and metrics for integrating these indicators in the rankings through a specific dimension for online universities.
5th CYD Ranking
The goal of this study is to endow the Spanish university system with greater transparency, applying a multidimensional approach. This 5th edition publishes results for 22 fields of knowledge and 2,235 programmes from 73 universities, which represent 87% of the 82 universities in Spain that award bachelor’s degrees. Of this total, 50 are public and 32 are private. All of the public universities and 72% of the private universities are included in the ranking.
The CYD Foundation (Conocimiento y Desarrollo, "Knowledge and Development" in Spanish) was created in 2002 as a business initiative convinced of the important role played by the universities in the country's economic and social development. Its goal is to analyse and promote the contribution made by Spanish universities to development, foster entrepreneurship in society, and broaden the ties between the university and the corporate world.
Press contact
-
Editorial department