"We need new types of educators, beyond the figure of the traditional teacher"

There are Europe-wide standards for quality assurance in higher education in general, which are perfectly applicable to e-learning, but they have a very broad focus and don't go into much detail when it come to the more specialized areas of e-learning, which poses something of a problem. There are certain initiatives and various agencies and organizations that develop specific quality assurance methodologies for e-learning, but in my view they aren't really functional as yet, for two reasons. Firstly, this is a new and constantly evolving environment. Secondly, there are certain contextual or political constraints, in the sense that e-learning sometimes competes with what we might see as traditional education, which has a series of regulatory parameters in terms of quality of teaching staff, the number of credits students need to obtain, and so on. This isn't always compatible with new types of courses based on greater flexibility and offering students a wider range of options. There is a degree of confrontation in the search for a market, which is potentially enormous. Yes, definitely. I had the opportunity to study at the UOC and was impressed, because I had a good relationship with the tutor, although it is true that at the time e-learning offered fewer opportunities than I thought. One of things I recommended was to increase the degree of interaction between the students and their evaluators. If you look at it from a teacher's perspective, there is still a lot of ground to cover, because the main changes are to do with managing the way courses are delivered rather than managing the teaching itself. Students have new options and new tools, but the learning process itself hasn't necessarily changed that much ? you don't need to go to the library because you can access online collections, and interaction with other students is easily achieved in virtual classrooms, but where a substantial change has occurred is in the way knowledge is transferred, and this is not always terribly well thought out or relies too heavily on the traditional teacher in a classroom, when the new system requires something different. Perhaps we don't need the traditional university lecturer but instead a group of knowledge managers and coordinators, new figures who perhaps haven't yet achieved the same degree of expertise as their forerunners. First and foremost, teachers must be people who adapt well to technology and can generate ideas about how e-learning technology should develop. Essentially, e-learning combines aspects of hard and soft technology, so teachers should be capable of devising changes and adaptations that reflect the presence of this soft technology. Perhaps what we need is not the traditional figure of teacher and evaluator rolled into one. There are arguments for introducing specialized profiles of teachers who organize and distribute knowledge, teachers who generate and direct debate, teachers who conduct assessment... Maybe we shouldn't combine all of these roles in a single figure and should actually be thinking about teaching teams and finding profiles that are more compatible with the complexities of this new way of teaching and learning. There are two things to consider. Obviously young teachers are willing to invest in learning because they consider everything they do now to be an investment that will bear fruit throughout their lives. For older teachers the investment is greater because the potential returns are less sizeable. But how far should we see technology as a barrier? I think we should be looking to make technology as easy as possible for everyone: for the most skilled users and those who find it more difficult. I would say that we're in the first phase, learning how to use it, but that in subsequent phases technology will be much easier to use and more adaptable to different types of users. It's like learning to write: at the beginning it's very hard, but picking up a pen eventually becomes second nature. The process with technology should be a similar one. This may seem a little complex initially, but in the future it will be easier and teachers won't be asked to make such an effort to learn and adapt. It's not so much about adapting to the technology as adapting to the environment. To use a tool like a social network you need to learn a series of actions and instructions, but you also need to learn how to "live" in that environment, because it requires a considerable change of mentality. It depends. For some types of courses, technology doesn't offer a good alternative to traditional teaching methods. But I think that in the future we might have more options. The growth of virtual games should help with the creation of virtual laboratories where students can experience content directly, so this practical component that current technology can't provide will be possible in the future. The other potential risk is the perceived lack of interaction with the student; you don't know who is on the other side of the screen, and society tends to adopt the view that this gives scope for fraud. I think that universities offering virtual courses must be very aware that this is one of the critical issues in terms of quality and that society needs to be reassured. I studied at the UOC, and I think that a degree of face-to-face interaction at given moments was very important. It doesn't have to be all the time, but at certain times it is important. This is one of the key debates. To what extent is society prepared to accept that learning and, in particular, higher education, are businesses? If we accept this, then we are dealing with a market, and people get their bearings by looking for a certain level of quality or a balance between quality and price. But society views higher education as a public asset and something that should be universally accessible, so the market no longer works because private companies are forced to compete with other suppliers who have the general backing of society. There are advantages and disadvantages to this. Sometimes the problem is that society doesn't give the right incentives to develop the new tools that private companies are willing to introduce. We need to find a balance, but it's a complicated task. They are not sufficient. We would say that a university like the UOC currently has two functions: one is to offer official degree courses, like the traditional face-to-face universities, and the other is to provide programmes outside the official degree structure. Quality is promoted by agencies, which are reactive organizations, but this doesn't have to be the case. The fact that quality agencies work to an agenda shaped by the official degree structure means that we tend to overlook the other area in which online universities have progress to make, the non-regulated area of specialized lifelong learning courses that aren't monitored under official quality assurance structures. I think this is a very important point. In terms of official degrees, quality is basically well regulated, but there are gaps in the system because we don't specifically address e-learning as a separate phenomenon. There is a lot of work to be done, and the government, the universities and the quality agencies must be in agreement that the e-learning market is also important for society.