"A learning culture includes not only what happens in the classroom, but in the entire university"

I am working on four projects. One of them is on developing a research project with the UOC, with a few universities in the U.S. and also universities in Europe. I am working with a lot of different people on this project. I have also been working on two different articles, actually book chapters. One is on organizational models in e-learning. It is coming out late this year or the beginning of next year. There's also another article on teaching and learning, and the lessons derived from teaching online. Moreover, there's another project I'm working on, in collaboration with Enric Serradell and Albert Sangrà. It is about how emerging technologies are changing educational models. All these projects are giving me the opportunity to meet with and learn from many outstanding professionals who are at the UOC. As a university founded on the idea of distance education, the UOC's challenges are somewhat different than those of traditional universities. The challenge for the UOC, having developed a very successful educational model that works extremely well with Information and Communications Technology (ICT), is how to adapt this model as technologies change and a greater number of universities become experienced in offering degree programmes at a distance. Emerging technologies enable many new forms of synchronous and asynchronous learning. Every university is faced with both the challenge and the opportunity of utilizing these emerging technologies to enable higher quality, more accessible learning resources and programmes. The UOC has been successful, but must continue to focus on creativity and innovation, along with documented quality in its programmes. ICTs have an essential role in expanding access to higher education. This is a dynamic moment in time. The use of ICTs is growing rapidly and people are creating new opportunities for e-learning inside universities but also outside the universities. This is a very different competitive environment than twenty or thirty years ago, when universities essentially had a monopoly on certification of knowledge. This monopoly on certification of knowledge may be in danger from advancing technologies and processes that allow for more immediate and sophisticated access to learn what one needs to know, more creative and effective methods for people to demonstrate what they know, and, finally, to demonstrate their capability to apply what they know to real situations. I believe this change is likely to create an uncertain future for many universities. One very big difference in comparing the European university with American universities is the diversity of higher education systems in the U.S. We have about 4,500 institutions of higher education in the U.S. with tremendous variation in mission, size, and funding, ranging from complex research-intensive graduate level universities to for-profit universities to small private residential liberal arts universities and including a rather unique system of community colleges, where research is not seen as a critical component of what they do. A small number of elite American universities also contribute in many different ways to global ideas about characteristics of world class universities. In Europe most institutions of higher education are public and more singularly focused on research. There are very few private universities in Spain, and almost zero for-profit universities, and the situation is the same for the rest of Europe. The idea of the university being a public entity but separated from the society is problematic in the U.S.; universities are seen as deeply integrated with communities and states, and as contributors to the social, economic, and cultural well-being of their communities. I am not sure how much this may be the case in Europe. Of course this is a moving target, with change all around us. Specifically, in the U.S., and this concerns me greatly, we are in a process of changing our political view of the university from one that is funded by, and has an impact on and contributes to the public, to another one which is funded by student fees and is organized for private benefit. A learning culture is an aspect that embodies the entire institution. It includes not only what happens in the classroom, but throughout the entire university, for example, within student services, the library and technology support, in addition to the classroom... All of the parts of the university are working together create this culture. Moreover, in our classrooms, we need to do a better job of encouraging our students and learners to feel free to ask questions, to challenge, to learn from each other and, in a way, to have the confidence to become teachers themselves. We know that in a really high level learning culture people learn most when they also have the opportunity to share what they have learned with others. And this is true in face-to-face environments, as well as in e-learning. So, what are the strategies in e-learning that we can employ to help it to happen? There are some things we can work on, including building collaborative opportunities within a classroom environment so that students gain experience working in teams and teaching and learning from each other as well. Whether face-to-face or online, learners need to have contact with faculty and staff on a personal level. Closed doors do not work: they need to be opened. Universities have to pay attention to particular small details, especially in an online environment. The details always matter. So, pay attention to details and to specific barriers faced by online learners. It is really important for creating excellence. Student needs are changing; universities must change and adapt, and the culture of the university will change. It was an excellent opportunity to take part in a conference focused around university leadership. The symposium involved leaders within Spain and Catalonia, and also a group of international researchers and experts on higher education. The focus was on how European higher education is changing and what dimensions of change are most apparent within universities in Europe. A specific theme of the programme had to do with the concept of quality, and how images and measurements of quality are increasingly represented within the management and evaluation of universities. My role was to provide some perspectives from outside of Europe. We are clearly in a period of rapid change. For centuries, universities have been unique places where knowledge is created and discovered, as well as stored in central repositories such as libraries and (more recently) computer centers. Universities have also been protected places (ideally) where knowledge is shared through teaching and learning in and outside of classrooms. For many, this idealized image of the university is changing, and the university is increasingly being viewed as an engine of economic growth and personal and societal advancement, and thus an organization more susceptible to the whims and whispers of both the economy and the politic. Actually, future roles of the university are going to be more constrained and defined by mission in the future. For example, being an active research university, a world class research university, is really, really expensive. I believe that universities are going to have a harder and harder time accumulating the resources to be at the highest level of performance; societies simply can't support the number of universities aspiring to be world-class. This is happening in the U.S. and elsewhere, including Europe. So, sustaining a high performance research university is going to be very difficult, because of funding restrictions. At the same time, demand is growing exponentially for certification of knowledge. We have seen it in Europe through the Bologna process, and we see it now in the U.S. with the development of new types of universities, including a plethora of for-profit universities and campuses whose reach crosses international boundaries. How universities respond to this new environment of growing demand and reduced public funding is going to be quite interesting. Universities will need to define themselves carefully and strive to provide qualitative advantages over their competitors, not just with respect to breadth and depth, but also with respect to mission. First of all, universities have to determine exactly what they want to be, what their mission is, what their specific goals are. And then, they have to look for specific ways to meet those goals and to measure how well they are doing on a continuous basis. Universities need to plan about how they are going to meet the needs of a changing society, maybe using new technologies, maybe developing a different range of offerings or a more specific focus for research. In the future, I believe that every university will have to think hard about what it wants to be, what it wants to achieve. I think the UOC is doing a really good job, making available its educational programmes to people where they live and work. The University seems to be working very hard and very well; it's extremely successful. Having said that, with so much change in society, especially in emerging technologies, it's important to address changes in what people need and what people want. One of the questions I asked in my discussions with key leaders within the UOC was: "How do you know if the things you are doing now are meeting the needs of the students today?" The UOC actually has some good evidence that shows that needs were being met in the past, but how do you know this is the case today? Actually, there's a lot of discussion and activity around these questions. Making sure that you go on looking at future needs is important. I have met with a lot of different groups and individuals, even with teachers within secondary schools, in order to understand how teachers are using emerging technologies in their own professional development and to begin to learn more about how these technologies could be more useful to them. First of all, I learned about a project underway to determine what teachers are doing now for professional development and how those learning approaches could be better integrated into their future professional development. Teachers need to think about life-long learning. During life, we learn in many different ways: when we are in the street or in the bus, when we are reading... We learn in all kind of ways, and teachers reflect all these ways of learning, and they engage students. I also have had the opportunity to study about the use of open education resources, and to meet with some very forward-looking colleagues in the UOC library... It's always hard, and generally an error, to attempt to generalize across the entire world, or even a country, because cultures and expectations are different. What is important to a culture and what is important to a society are not always the same. I don't think we can expect universality on every single measurement. In the U.S., our language courses are probably not better than here in Spain. Both countries have created a scientifically oriented society, and I'm not sure we can sustain this scientific progress without also educating our youth more effectively to appreciate diverse cultures and the value of understanding multiple views of the world through different languages. We are moving into a period of time where societies and individuals need to be globally competitive. The economy and communication strategies are global, so we need to help young people to understand the world better, speak other languages and engage with other cultures more effectively and earlier in life. The more we get it, the more prepared we will be. We could benefit tremendously by exposing our young people to other cultural settings, sending more kids abroad and having experiences in another languages. Probably that is also a challenge for Spain. I can't say what the answer is for Spain, but I think it's pretty clear that in the U.S., the unemployment rate for undergraduates is relatively low, and the salaries that they achieve are pretty competitive. That's the reason why more and more people are seeking and needing college degrees. The number one challenge for universities is to help our graduates and learners to develop their skills to learn life-long, but also to work with other people, to speak other languages, to communicate across cultural boundaries and to work in teams. I'm glad you asked me that, because those learners who understand ICT and use them effectively, and those who adapt themselves to new technologies, will be among the most competitive ones. The UOC is a very interesting, exciting and dynamic organization. It has created a great research and scholarly environment for online learning and new technologies; the eLearn Center, combined with IN3, may be unique in the world. There are just a few places anywhere with this level of knowledge on ICT technologies. There is a lot we can learn from each other, and it's been a tremendous pleasure to learn from my colleagues here at the eLearn Center. It would be a real pleasure for me to continue to collaborate in some way with colleagues here at the UOC.