Twenty years of the world's first online university

The UOC grew from an initiative of the Catalan Government to boost the range of distance-learning university courses on offer. Our institution was a pioneer in the use of the Internet as a teaching tool, over a period now spanning twenty years, and it has been and continues to be a benchmark in the emergence and development of e-learning, taking advantage of constant technological advances. Specifically, "technology enabled us and continues to enable us to break with the past," in the words of the president Josep A. Planell, "and to do things that had seemed impossible: from rethinking higher distance learning to rethinking the learning of professions that still do not exist."

Isaac Asimov, one of the leading science-fiction authors of the twentieth century, not only imagined what the world would be like in the future, but in an interview published in 1988 (years before the creation of the World Wide Web) he imagined the impact of technology on education.

"Since 1995, the UOC has been turning this future that he imagined into reality." For this reason, to mark the twentieth anniversary of our founding, we would like to remember his words with a commemorative video "that has all the validity and future projection", states Planell.

Twenty years of work

The UOC first began in the 1995-1996 academic year with 200 students on the officially recognized Educational Psychology and Business Studies courses, which were taught in Catalan. During this time, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya has grown, and it now has almost 60,000 graduates in a university community of more than 200,000 people.

Throughout the years, the University has steadily expanded and diversified the range of courses, including courses in Spanish, English and French. It has improved and evolved its educational model, placing the student at the centre of the learning activity. It has expanded progressively in Catalonia and Spain, with an extensive regional network of centres, and it has taken the leap into the international sphere, establishing a centre in Mexico as the springboard for expansion into the Latin American market. It also has two research centres specializing in the information and knowledge society (IN3) and in e-learning (eLearn Center), becoming an international benchmark in both these spheres.

Today, the UOC has begun a process of development to meet new educational needs in different branches of knowledge. An example of this is the University's commitment to offering courses online that could, until now, only be perceived as on-site: the Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts, a new degree aimed at training visual arts creators in pace with the developments of the digital society.