Interviews

Rector Tubella, what has been done over this time?

Over this year, I feel that, fundamentally, we have achieved four things. Firstly, we have built the foundations that we wanted; thus, we have ensured the sustainability of the University, with a restructuring of the institution. Secondly, we have negotiated and signed a programme contract with the Generalitat (the Catalan regional government) for the next four years. Thirdly, we have driven standardisation at the University in the four main areas: teaching, technology, research and relations between the university and business. And, finally, we have defined the strategic lines for the programme contract 2006-2009.

No doubt, one of the main raisons d'être for a university has to the teaching. You mention that one of the first actions was to promote this area. Could you be a bit more specific as to what has been done in this ambit?

When we came into office, we set ourselves nine objectives, which at the time seemed very wide-ranging. However, underpinning these we had prepared much more specific aims and activities. The main aim in terms of teaching was to establish a policy that made the academic careers and roles of the teaching staff clearer.

What have we done to achieve this? Firstly, we have completed the assessment of the teaching staff; there was an assessment underway, which we returned to and, in the coming days, we shall present a very important document on this issue to the Teaching Staff Council. It is a document which I feel that the teaching staff have been waiting for for many years, which will clear up their academic career paths, and establish new categories and salaries in relation to these categories. Likewise, this document will establish a whole series of things that, to date, could not be carried out in an ordered and clear way, such as periods on sabbatical, study permits, etc. This is an important action that we have carried out: clearing up the career path in this way. Now, people know what they can achieve in the future.

Another challenge has been the accreditation of the teaching staff by the AQU, the Quality Agency. We got the results a week ago; we presented 64 professors and had 59 of them accredited. This is not a definitive figure: we will probably present an appeal and have a couple more accredited. In any case, with 59 professors accredited from 64 presented, we are the private university that has accredited by far the most professors. We have been congratulated by the AQU for the quality of the professors presented and for the quality of the process. The teaching staff is an important part of the University: we are a teaching institution.

We have just completed an institutional assessment carried out by the European University Association (EUA). We won't have the official written report for another two months, and we will then publish it. For the moment, I have an oral summary, and they assure me that the assessment of the institution has been extraordinarily positive.

We have also done other things which might not be so central, such as improvements in the collaborative teaching staff area, in questions relating to salary conditions and in relation to the institution itself. We have introduced measures to adapt to the European Higher Education Area, and we have improved shared responsibility between teaching and management.

Another of the founding pillars of the tasks at a university is, obviously, research. What has been done to promote this specifically over this time?

The first thing we did was resuscitate, to put it graphically, the Scientific Commission. We had an unbeatable Scientific Commission, with high-level internationally renowned experts from all areas of research, that hadn't met since 2002. We brought them together and asked for advice about what needed to be done in the area. This advice came in the form of a map for research and a wide call for groups and projects. These experts offered an initial assessment: they advised us which groups we could put our hopes in and which we could not. They proposed offering seed funding for this map of groups.

Alongside this, we have been negotiating for money in the programme contract to free up time for professors to be able to carry out research. How can we free up time for professors? By increasing their number, and this is what we have done. The programme contract allows us to do so to the extent that teaching staff can dedicate an average of 30% of their time to research. This, together with the research map that we have mentioned, will allow us to see after a year, ie, this May, what we have that is really worthwhile in terms of research. I believe that this improvement in terms of time is the first step in achieving quantitative and qualitative improvements in research.

In terms of this development of high-level research activities, agreements have been signed with a number of institutions of international scope.

Yes. For example, we have put into practice an agreement we signed with the Oxford Internet Institute a few months ago. We have set up a PhD course run jointly by both institutions. The first class on this course began on Wednesday January 17.

All these internal tasks have been carried out whilst bearing in mind another concern you pointed out: the fact that we belong to a network of Catalan universities, which meant that good relations had to be established and maintained with the other institutions. How has this process gone?

We have made great progress in consolidating our role in the system. The public universities and the UOC form part of the ACUP (Associació Catalana d'Universitats Públiques, Catalan Association of Public Universities). These institutions have accepted us as a complementary element in the university system. The UOC, furthermore, balances the number of students in the system, as it covers a need that had not been previously covered for that group of people who could not go to a physical university. As the number of UOC students grows, it balances the loss of students from the system. No doubt, this also helps these physical universities see that the UOC is not a direct competitor, but that it can, in some cases, be an element to help fight against the loss of students or their dropping out. Thus, with this in mind, we are currently working on a series of projects and contacts with the University of Barcelona and the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Likewise, in the field of technology, we have a comprehensive aim to improve and modernise the Virtual Campus. The Campus is now a few years old, and has been improved from time to time, but we have to continue improving it. Indeed, we have had a project presented to us that would allow us to do so, whilst also helping us dialogue with the system. What's more, this project has shown us that we can be leaders. It is the project to create a campus based on free software for all the Catalan universities and the regional government's Universities and Research Commission. The UOC has led the start-up of this campus, not without some problems, because there were some universities that backed a certain technology and others that backed another. The UOC helped gain consensus among all the universities. This has also helped in terms of what we were talking about to improve relations with the system.

What we have done in terms of technology is lead this virtual campus for the Catalan system, but we have also driven technological innovation in terms of the teaching materials. This year, we received the IGC award for Digital Innovation in the university and institution category for the Myway project. Myway shows how one material can be used in a range of formats, whether digital, audio or Daisy.

We have also done other things in the field of technology, such as design the computing plan, a computer environment and a new management processes plan. We are also remodelling the portal, which is not something that can be done quickly: we have been working on it for a year and I know that some of us are in a real hurry to see the results. We need to bear in mind that some similar projects have taken sixteen months. In any case, I hope that we will soon be able to see it.

If we had to highlight any of the projects we have mentioned so far, I think that in terms of teaching the star project has been the AQU accreditation; in terms of research, it is the map that we talked about earlier and the fact that we have been able to free up 30% of the teaching staff's time, and in terms of technology, the virtual campus.

In the same way that the virtual campus has allowed for the building of relationships with the other universities, work has also been done over these months to build relationships with business through a number of initiatives.

In this area, apart from ordering and tidying up our business projects, we also signed 59 agreements with businesses and have another 38 associated companies. We have begun a series of highly customised meetings to ensure that these agreements are not forgotten in a drawer or simply used for internships or to gain discounts for tailor-made training for their employees; instead, they should allow us to undertake joint projects, important joint projects.

Apart from working at strengthening and developing these four ambits (teaching, research, technology and relations with the business world), you have also prepared a strategic plan to set out the lines for future development.

The plan that the UOC, the institution, had was to start defining the strategic plan during 2006. With the change in the governing body, it would have been irresponsible for us to have prepared a strategic plan without knowing the state of affairs at the institution. For this reason, we started work on the new Strategic Plan 2007-2010 before the summer, in the month of June. Last September, we had a closed Governing Body meeting and we now have a document with the main strategic lines that we presented to the assessors from the EUA. We took advantage of their visit to assess, to some degree, whether we were heading in the right direction and the response we got was very positive. We now have the main lines that are to form the basis of this plan and we have started to discuss them with the organisation. Once we have assessed this document with the various commissions, we will upload it. We aim to complete these discussions by the month of March and, thus, have the Strategic Plan in April.