Sanjay Sarma, Vice President at MIT, to talk about the future of education in the inaugural lecture for the UOC's 25th academic year

The UOC's inaugural lecture for the 2020/2021 academic year will be given by Sanjay Sarma, the Fred Fort Flowers (1941) and Daniel Fort Flowers (1941) Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Vice President for Open Learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The lecture - "What is the future of education?" - will be streamed live online at 4 p.m. (CEST) on Wednesday 21 October. The event will also involve the Government of Catalonia's Minister for Business and Knowledge, Ramon Tremosa.

Sanjay Sarma is a leading authority worldwide both on research into the science of learning and on mechanical engineering, and credited with developing technology used in radio-frequency identification (RFID).

Sarma will look at the future of education by answering a series of questions: What do students get from universities? How can online education play a role in the future of society, work and human potential? How has COVID changed things? He will present his views on these questions and reflect on the role the UOC can play in shaping the future.

Who is Sanjay Sarma?

Born in India in 1968, his studies in mechanical engineering earned him a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (1989), a master's degree from Carnegie Mellon University (1992) and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (1995).

He is the Vice President for Open Learning at MIT. As head of its Office of Digital Learning, he is responsible for developing new online education models for MIT's courses and programmes, defining their models for blended learning, and supervising the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative (MITili) and OpenCourseWare and MITx open online learning courses. He is also responsible for the Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), which works on the future of education with universities worldwide, including the UOC.

The UOC's 25th academic year

The UOC began life 25 years ago as a digital native at a time when only 0.4% of the world's population was connected to the internet, when the landline was still the best way to stay in touch, when ADSL was just starting out and Google hadn't even been founded. The UOC turned higher education on its head with its asynchronous online teaching and learning. It was the 1995/1996 academic year and 200 students put their faith in a new university to study Educational Psychology or Business Sciences, the only two programmes on offer. The UOC was able to take advantage of the incipient World Wide Web to become the first ever distanceless university, with the mission to provide lifelong learning.