You have decided to be active protagonists in your future, and learning is the driving force that will let you grow, know, progress, transform yourselves and achieve your goals in life. That is why it is such an honour for us, the members of the university’s teaching and administrative staff, to be able to accompany you on this path you are starting out on today!

This new academic year 2025/2026 will see you work on challenges, tests, assignments, readings… transmitting and acquiring knowledge that will let us, all of us who form part of the UOC, both you the students and the people working for you, dare to know.

This daring to know means we want to understand the world around us. The research developed at the UOC looks to contribute to finding solutions for the most important social challenges of our times: from the possible futures for lifelong and lifewide learning to how we can build technology that is more humane and ethical, how we can ensure a digital transition that is both equitable and sustainable, how we can foster critical thinking and ethical citizenship, how we can investigate and promote digital health and planetary well-being, or how we can nurture culture in order to become a more critical society.

I'm particularly pleased to be able to announce that this academic year 2025/2026 sees a special milestone for our university: the start of our first joint bachelor's degree programme, in software development, developed by the UOC, the Spanish Distance Learning University (UNED) and the Open University of the Netherlands (OU). This initiative has come about thanks to the OpenEU alliance, which we coordinate from the UOC.

OpenEU brings together Europe's leading open and distance universities alongside five on-campus universities that are committed to pushing forward with their digital transformation. It represents the chance to make progress towards an updated version of the European Higher Education Area, underpinning lifelong and lifewide learning throughout Europe.

We're doing this with the desire to further expand our goal to open opportunities to continue transforming, to continue being, essentially, a driving force behind change in society and education. This goal has a direct impact on the more than 120,000 people in our community – a community that you too now form part of. I'd encourage you to play an active role in the student bodies – faculty committees, Student Council and University Council – so that you can contribute to enriching every part of the university.

Welcome to the UOC and thank you for placing your trust in us.

All the best for this academic year!

Àngels Fitó
Rector of the UOC