The university of the future: digital, accessible and personalized, leading the fight against disinformation

The presidents of leading distance universities, including the UOC's president, Josep A. Planell, discussed the main trends involving the university of the future and lifelong learning at a round table organized by the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) for the I•HE2020 "Online Bridging Event" conference,  held from 28 to 30 October.

The speakers at this event, which took place online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, were Karl Dittrich, president of both the European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education (EQAR) and the Open University of the Netherlands (OU); Sari Lindblom, rector of the University of Helsinki and president of UNA Europa; and Tim Blackman, vice-chancellor of the UK's Open University.

All the participants agreed that the coronavirus pandemic is accelerating university digitization and that the new technologies are transforming education. Universities no longer have a monopoly on lifelong learning and now have to compete with platforms such as LinkedIn or Google, which offer bespoke training courses to their users, with the added advantage that they have access to their personal data. Faced with this scenario, President Planell focused on "universities' capacity to connect research with education, a virtuous circle that these technology platforms do not have".

With the quickening pace of digitization, it has already become clear that traditional universities are evolving toward a mixed educational model, combining face-to-face and online, enabling them to compete with the distance universities.

What will the online universities of the future be like?

In the future, the key features of distance university education will be personalization, flexibility, traceability and sociability – interpreted as collaboration," Planell said, stressing the need for university education to connect with the other knowledge resources existing in society: companies, museums, research institutions, etc.

Tim Blackman, the British Open University's vice-chancellor (with 200,000 students around the world), highlighted the need for universities to provide tools to combat disinformation, particularly in such a difficult time as the present, in which fake news, conspiracy theories and pressure groups such as the anti-vaxxers abound on the social media and sow confusion in society. "Our response to disinformation must be to universalize access to higher education, giving people the tools to develop their talents," Blackman said. He also emphasized the importance of diversity in the university world: "Research has shown that learning in a diverse environment gives better results than when the learning environment is homogeneous," referring to the elitist universities. For Blackman, "elitism in the university world has become a problem in the United Kingdom".

In Finland, on the other hand, everyone has the possibility to study at university, as higher education in this country is either free or very affordable. Sari Lindblom, the University of Helsinki's rector, explained that the country's 30 universities offer both in-person and lifelong education (i.e. all of them are "open" universities) and the goal is for the entire population to be able to study for university qualifications. As president of UNA Europa – an alliance of 8 high-profile universities, which includes the Paris Sorbonne and the Universities of Bologna and Edinburgh, among others – Lindblom said that the association's mission is to foster innovation in the university world's teaching practices: "Both classic and online learning can either be boring or innovative. It is important to develop innovative teaching methods. That is precisely that we pursue at UNA Lab."

Along the same lines, President Planell agreed that online education should not reproduce the one-way communication model used in many brick-and-mortar universities, and highlighted the UOC's role in mentoring students throughout their learning process: "We have 9,000 online classes and a system in which academics and administrative staff work together as a team to empower students as chief learning officers of their own education." Planell suggested that the education of the future will include shorter bespoke courses that focus less on getting a qualification and more on training students in new skills that align with society's needs. He also refuted the myth that the education offered by the online universities is second class: "The key factor is the teaching method. Lifelong learning universities are capable of offering very high-quality education, as shown by the fact that we are consistently included in the world's top university rankings." Just a few days earlier, the UOC had been included in the list of the world's best universities published by the highly respected Times Higher Education (THE).

Planell proposed that online learning was the only option capable of addressing the educational challenges facing the society of the future, echoing a report published by the OECD in 2009: "In 2030, we will need to provide higher education for 200 million students. This is a challenge that can only be fully met by online learning. It is not realistic to rely solely on brick-and-mortar universities."

Another key point debated by the round table's participants was the need for European universities to work together to offer inter-university programmes. "A significant step in this direction would be to offer a single European university certificate," Dittrich said. All of the participants agreed that the diverse regulatory frameworks applied in the different countries is one of the obstacles to unifying European higher education. Their proposal was to start working together on limited-scale projects and grow from there.