"At the UOC we want to use knowledge to create initiatives for positive social transformation"

 

"Open Knowledge as a Common Good" was the headline given by the UOC's Vice President for Globalization and Cooperation to her recent article in Horizons, the magazine of the International Association of Universities (IAU). This idea pervades the work of the team led by Pastora Martínez Samper, who has been leading the University’s globalization strategy since 2016, and whose CV includes a PhD in Physics, an Executive MBA and a Master's Degree in Leadership and Management in Science and Innovation. A key focus of her work at the UOC's Globalization and Cooperation department has been the incorporation of the UN's 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals into the UOC's Strategic Plan, and this has given rise to many collaborations with partners in and beyond academia, and to initiatives such as the University's Open Knowledge and Equality Plans.

Since 2019 she has been director of the Observatory of University Development Cooperation, which is promoted by the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE), the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation. And in 2018 she was a member of the Spanish delegation to the United Nations High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development.

 

"Open Knowledge as a Common Good" was the headline given by the UOC's Vice President for Globalization and Cooperation to her recent article in Horizons, the magazine of the International Association of Universities (IAU). This idea pervades the work of the team led by Pastora Martínez Samper, who has been leading the University’s globalization strategy since 2016, and whose CV includes a PhD in Physics, an Executive MBA and a Master's Degree in Leadership and Management in Science and Innovation. A key focus of her work at the UOC's Globalization and Cooperation department has been the incorporation of the UN's 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals into the UOC's Strategic Plan, and this has given rise to many collaborations with partners in and beyond academia, and to initiatives such as the University's Open Knowledge and Equality Plans.

Since 2019 she has been director of the Observatory of University Development Cooperation, which is promoted by the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE), the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation. And in 2018 she was a member of the Spanish delegation to the United Nations High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development.

In 2020, the worldwide teaching community was faced with the huge challenge of adapting their classroom-based activities to remote teaching, with little training, preparation, time or resources for this. According to UNESCO, this crisis affected 90% of the world's students.

It was a huge challenge, one that was particularly difficult to address due to the difficulties that many education systems were already having in terms of quality assurance, unequal access and a lack of digitalization and digital competencies among teachers, often compounded by public funding cuts. The situation unveiled many inequalities that need to be addressed.

That's when we saw that sharing the UOC’s 25 years' worth of e-learning knowledge with teachers around the world was not only a possibility but something that we had to do, and in a way that would enable teachers to use it and put it into practice. In April 2020 we launched our Emergency Remote Teaching programme, offering Spanish-speaking teachers in any country online open-access training, with 24 presentations on subjects such as how to design an online course, how to carry out assessment remotely or how to motivate students.

Thanks to contributions from all across the UOC, the initiative was a great success. It was followed live by around ten thousand teachers and has now been viewed a total of over 160,000 times in Catalonia, Spain and Latin America. It is the university development cooperation project with the highest impact in the UOC's entire history. Its success stems from our ability to respond to the problem immediately, and from the sound relationships we had built with educational institutions in Ibero-America and with international networks such as CINDA and the IAU. We must keep nurturing these partnerships to share knowledge, learning and experiences and turn them into definite actions. 

It's odd, this widespread perception that work at university and the transformation of society are unrelated. I don’t believe there can be transformation without knowledge. At our University we generate, share and transfer knowledge, we give it value and often we turn it into initiatives for positive social transformation. The UOC's social impact in Catalonia over these last 25 years is unquestionable: it has provided education to over 53,000 people who have chosen us at different points in their lives, often in circumstances which would have made it difficult to study at other universities.

But in academia we have contributed to the perception of a university that is unaffected by social needs, through specific actions and positions, or through our lack of them. And we can only change this perception by working at it within academia, as we have been doing, for example with the incorporation of the UN's 2030 Agenda into our Strategic Plan 2017-2020. This represented a commitment to include the international political agenda in our action plan in order to address major social challenges in a global manner. In fact, incorporating the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into our lines of work enabled us to see, back in 2018, that a large proportion of the research carried out at the IN3 is aligned with them.

We’re committed to contributing to a better society for everyone to live in. This is reflected in our programmes, our teaching projects, our R&I and in other activities with a wide range of partners. This commitment has become even clearer during the pandemic.

The 2030 Agenda helps us focus on a set of social needs that can only be addressed through shared and collective work by the various different players and sectors. The world of academia has a lot to say and contribute in this regard, something that has become more and more clear, and many universities have incorporated the 2030 Agenda into their strategies as a result. 

We've committed to it in the belief it will speed up our internal and external transformation. In our teaching, we’re incorporating ‘global ethical commitment’ as an interdisciplinary competency. In the field of R&I, our Open Knowledge Action Plan aims to share and generate knowledge both inside and outside the world of academia to contribute to the SDGs. The mainstreaming of the gender perspective is taking shape thanks to our Gender Equality Plan 2020-2024, and another example is the upcoming Environmental Sustainability Plan, which we're co-designing with the University Council's drive and leadership. 

The work we’re carrying out jointly with university systems is also worth noting. In Spain, the UOC earned recognition for addressing the challenges of the 2030 Agenda and their solutions, and the commitments made by Spanish universities are reflected in the Spanish Government’s Action Plan, presented to the UN in 2018, and in its Sustainable Development Strategy, approved in June. In Catalonia, universities have taken a step further: in 2020 the Interuniversity Council of Catalonia agreed on an action plan to accelerate the incorporation of the 2030 Agenda into the university system, to jointly address the challenges and the actions to be taken.

Online learning is undoubtedly a very powerful way of facilitating access to higher education. We saw this in Catalonia when we created the UOC, which led to people from previously excluded groups obtaining university educations. We can see how this idea is being adopted by other university systems to increase the number of people with access to tertiary education. The pandemic has fuelled this trend, and even countries where e-learning was previously not allowed, such as Peru, have made a U-turn. 

And, as with the application of any methodology, it is essential to take students' circumstances into account, as their learning can be hindered or prevented by many types of inequality such as the digital divide. This is why the steps we're taking to contribute to the digital transformation of education, supporting institutions and teaching staff, must have the fight against unequal access and the digital divide as a central pillar. This path must be walked hand in hand with other local organizations and institutions. 

There can be no transformation without knowledge. And, in order to achieve extensive social transformation, knowledge must be within everyone's reach. Although it may seem that everyone has unlimited access to knowledge in this information society, it’s not always available for free and without restrictions. In addition, it resides in many different places, not just in academia. Therefore, in order to contribute to the emergence of transformative initiatives, we want to become a ‘knowledge hub’, a place where people from in and outside academia can come together to nurture and generate new knowledge. We want to provide spaces for dialogue and knowledge creation and exchange, bringing together approaches and ideas from all sorts of sources. We must start by making the knowledge generated at the UOC available and accessible, facilitating its reuse, redistribution and reproduction, which is what our Open Knowledge Action Plan aims to achieve. 

The University must open up in every way, becoming more porous and connected to society, focusing on the hub and relations between people or organizations, as highlighted by Lorena Jaume-Palasí, the chair of our Advisory Board.

Our partnership with the Sala Beckett theatre, which is based in Barcelona and focuses on contemporary drama, was formed in 2017 with the aim of providing meeting places and areas for knowledge creation both inside and outside the world of academia. The UOC was looking for a proposal to get knowledge out into the wider world, and the Sala Beckett theatre, which is located very close to us in the 22@ district, was the perfect partner for sharing knowledge in a completely different environment to that of the University.

We’ve run six seasons together, and they have been a resounding success both for the thousands of participants and for the two institutions. We’ve reflected on aspects as diverse as brain conditions, urban terrors, young people and fiction, death, the playwright Lluïsa Cunillé or gender-based violence and power structures. We're so happy with the results that we're already planning two new seasons: on the tension between people and the planet, and on artificial intelligence.

One of our actions is the promotion of global classrooms at the UOC, with diverse teachers and students and a curriculum based on a perspective that is global, local and intercultural. This aims to foster a better understanding of the world, with multiple visions and realities, while also developing basic employability competencies. 

In relation to this, virtual mobility is really good for working on some of our goals, such as the promotion of these global classrooms and the internationalization of the universities in the programme, sharing both academic and administrative lessons. We know that, for some institutions taking part in it, virtual mobility provides their students with an opportunity to enjoy an international experience. Since 2016, over 2,000 students from Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile have been through the UOC's classrooms. For 2022, we are looking at mobility programmes with European universities and Deakin University in Australia.

In order to address the needs of a changing and increasingly interconnected world, we, the universities, must urgently reflect, ask questions and make decisions about our place in education. Predictions are hard to make, but we must agree on the role of universities, teaching staff and students, through a pact with other players in society. I'm convinced that digital transformation is part of the equation, and we are responsible for incorporating it in our response to present and future needs.