SofIA: the UOC’s strategy for integrating humanistic, ethical and disruptive artificial intelligence

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) seeks to use artificial intelligence (AI) to support students through every step of their academic journey, take teaching to a whole new level, reduce bureaucracy and provide continuous education for its staff. Although AI already has many applications in university settings, they pale in comparison to the many potential uses that are yet to be developed and discovered. This is why the UOC is firmly committed to SofIA, an initiative that is reshaping not only teaching but also the university's administration, student support services and the staff's professional development. The goal is to become an AI-enabled institution (with AI integrated at every level) and to lead the way for universities worldwide. This is the strategy designed to make the university a pioneering institution and integrate AI into its own educational and administrative model.

"Through SofIA, the UOC is using AI to support its educational model based, above all, on a human-centred focus," said Teresa Guasch, Vice Rector for Teaching and Learning. "It's not simply a matter of embracing technology; we're talking about transforming the way we teach, learn and interact with our community."

The team in the university's Digital Transformation department explained that "rather than replacing the human component, AI enhances it, freeing up professionals to focus on greater value-added work". SofIA is an AI framework with a humanistic and ethical approach that aims to unleash people's potential. Guasch stressed that the UOC is committed to "improving our students' learning experience so that we can support them in a way that is better tailored to their needs, provided on time and in a more agile manner and, above all, that is more personalized, while being ethical and responsible".

"The UOC is harnessing artificial intelligence to support both teachers and students at every stage of the teaching and learning process, covering everything from the design of a course – with its contents and assessment activities – to the provision of support, assessment and personalized feedback," said Robert Clarisó, associate professor in the Faculty of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications. Manel Jiménez-Morales, Vice Rector for Alliances, Community and Culture, said that "we need to think about technology from a human-centred perspective, as obvious as that may sound, and understand its real impact in terms of how students use it and the potential they see in it".

Greater efficiency across all internal processes

However, in addition to the clear impact it will have in the classroom, AI will also enhance all the university's internal management and administrative processes by automating repetitive tasks, optimizing workflows and helping to provide students with more agile and proactive support. "Artificial intelligence – and generative AI in particular – enables us to automate tasks and manage vast quantities of information," said Clarisó. According to the members of the Digital Transformation team, "AI will help us become a more efficient, relevant and people-centred institution".

These advances are supported by an experimentation framework available to the entire UOC community. To encourage its use, the university has designed a specific training plan to equip all staff members, both teaching and administrative staff, with the skills needed to use AI in their daily work. This includes training at every level – from beginner to advanced – and is backed by an active community of practice that fosters collaborative learning and internal innovation.

How can the responsible deployment of AI be ensured at every level?

One of the key pillars of the implementation of AI at the UOC is the cross-functional committee tasked with ensuring its safe and responsible use in line with the university's institutional values. As Guillem Garcia Brustenga of the eLearning Innovation Center (eLinC) explained, its members are "ethics, legal, security, data and technology experts" who must consider and assess all AI-related initiatives and experiments before they are rolled out. "The UOC is advocating for a responsible adoption of AI," said Clarisó.

This governance model enables the UOC to anticipate potential algorithmic biases, assess legal and educational impacts and put in place monitoring protocols for each pilot initiative, and always "with a strong commitment to ethics and transparency," said Garcia Brustenga. This mitigates potential risks, guarantees the traceability of actions and ensures that every AI application complies with the principles of equity, quality and respect for privacy, referred to by Guasch as "the UOC's core values". "We're using SofIA to redefine the future of the university. Our aim is to spearhead the integration of artificial intelligence in a way that is in keeping with our principles and mission," she said.

The SofIA initiative, which started a year ago, is open to everyone in the UOC community. "Under the proposed experimentation framework, any member of the UOC can suggest possible uses of AI. If it adds value and the risks can be mitigated, the proposal will be supported with the appropriate technology," said Garcia Brustenga. He also added that, once the testing phase is over, "SofIA will have to re-evaluate the value provided and the risk mitigation before considering whether to implement the results". A further layer of protection is provided by the university's "Assessment, Feedback and AI (AFIA) group which, together with the eLinC, will ensure that the experiment is aligned with the UOC's educational model".

This is why, as Clarisó says, "AI should be introduced not for its own sake but because it brings genuine improvements to students, teaching staff and management processes". He added that, once the use of AI has been incorporated because it is useful and adds value, "it won't be a one-time task: it must be an ongoing process".

In summary, and as highlighted by the Digital Transformation team, SofIA initiatives can be split into two large groups based on their primary focus: AI uses capable of making current processes more efficient, and the scenarios in which innovative services can be introduced and ground-breaking changes can be made to processes. The team stressed that the aim is to enable routine and administrative tasks "to be automated," freeing up time for teaching and administrative staff "to focus their efforts on building trust-based relationships with students".

Use cases that stand out for their efficiency or transformative potential

Among the most notable use cases analysed or tested so far are virtual assistants in certain courses, which can provide real-time context-based responses to students' frequently asked questions. The Classroom chatbot and the Library chatbot, which, Clarisó said, are yielding "very promising results" in terms of quality, are two such examples. He explained that these resources will be on hand around the clock "to supplement the teaching staff's responses".

Other tools allow for automatic rubric generation to provide more feedback on assignments; predictive analyses of academic performance; assistance for students with disabilities with real-time voice recognition and subtitling tools, and the creation of personalized content or recommendation of resources and activities based on students' individual learning profiles.

According to Clarisó, AI also provides numerous and varied possibilities in the field of research, as it supports processes as diverse as "carrying out scientific literature searches, preparing project proposals, processing data and drafting articles".

As for administrative tasks, when it comes to managing credit recognition – a complex task involving programmes of study from different universities in different countries – Clarisó explained that the UOC has seen that "generative AI is simplifying and streamlining the process, speeding up prior studies assessments" thanks to a semi-automatic evaluation of students' pre-UOC qualifications.

Backed by participation in a number of international initiatives

In addition to driving internal innovation, the UOC welcomes contributions from the international networks to which it belongs. Thanks to its collaboration with other universities and research centres on the responsible use of artificial intelligence in higher education, together with its participation in consortia such as AI4U, ADMIT and AIGEN, the UOC can exchange knowledge, establish common ethical standards and reaffirm its position as a European leader in the digital transformation of education. Likewise, it can share experiences of best practices and tools that have proven effective in other fields and countries and for other uses. In short, institutions, like the UOC, look to position themselves as higher education institutions capable of anticipating needs, offering personalized services and ensuring the delivery of quality, ethical and transformative education for their communities with proactive and ethical assistance from AI.