UOC leads online universities in research

Of these ten high performance indicators, two concern research and position the UOC as the leading online university in this category. The University has green lights in interdisciplinary and postdoctoral publications. It was found to have medium performance according to the other indicators. This result is a reflection of the University's commitment to research, which is undertaken by 400 researchers, 46 research groups, three research centres and one doctoral school.

According to the ranking, the UOC has three other high performance indicators in teaching and learning. Specifically, it obtained green lights in success rate and in percentage of bachelor's and master's degree students from other autonomous communities.

The UOC also has two high performance indicators in knowledge transfer: in licence revenues and in continuing training revenues, and medium performance in number of spin-offs . This result reflects the work done by the University in recent years to create closer cooperation ties between business enterprises, other universities and R&I entities, in line with the third objective that all universities must achieve: knowledge and technology transfer.

In regard to international focus, the UOC has two high performance indicators: in master's degree programmes taught in a foreign language and in international faculty members. It has two medium performance indicators in bachelor's degree programmes taught in a foreign language and in international publications. 

The CYD ranking also assesses universities' contribution to regional development. In this respect, the UOC has a high performance indicator in regional publications and two medium performance indicators in regional research funds and publications with businesses in the region.

The study found Catalonia to be the autonomous community with the largest number of high performance indicators, with six of the ten best universities in Spain. Top of the list is the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).

The UOC works to ensure that the rankings take into account the specific features of online universities

The UOC contributes to improving the presence of online universities in the rankings through the CODUR project, a European project headed by the UOC which has enabled quality criteria to be set, and guidelines and metrics to be created for integrating these indicators in the rankings through a specific dimension for online universities.

Sixth CYD ranking

The goal of this study is to endow the Spanish university system with greater transparency, applying a multidimensional approach. This 6th edition publishes results for 23 fields of knowledge and 2,522 programmes from 73 universities, which represent 90% of the 81 universities in Spain that award bachelor’s degrees. Of this total, 48 are public and 25 are private.

The CYD Foundation (Conocimiento y Desarrollo, "Knowledge and Development" in Spanish) was created in 2002 as a business initiative convinced of the important role played by the universities in the country's economic and social development. Its goal is to analyse and promote the contribution made by Spanish universities to development, to foster entrepreneurship in society, and to broaden the ties between the university and the corporate world.

Related links:

The UOC leads in knowledge transfer among online universities