It is now ten years since we started the UOC and we are inaugurating this tenth year with the same responsibility - tension and excitement - with which we began the first. The UOC's technical and teaching characteristics do not allow us - or the students, teachers or managerial staff - to become stuck in a rut. It is not always an easy process, but the environment is always one of learning and stimulation. For this reason, a new academic year is not just a new opportunity to discover the subjects and skills that are called for by the speciality, but also a chance to learn in a context which obliges us to learn how to acquire information and learn how to convey it using the immense possibilities which ICTs provide. In these ten years, we hope that we have provided this service to a great number of people, and as we consider it to be of great value, we hope that many more access it.

For this reason, it is an honour - and a great opportunity - that, on the inauguration of the academic year, Professor Martin Carnoy, from Stanford University and a member of the IN3 Scientific Council, will be giving the inaugural lecture on "ICTs in teaching: possibilities and challenges". The analysis that he has made is both thorough and positive about what information and communication technologies have represented and continue to represent in the business and academic worlds. After reading it and noting the chronology, the various cases he offers as proof and the evaluation he makes, our tenth anniversary takes on an especially positive feel. I would therefore like to thank Professor Carnoy for his lecture. I am sure that such a stimulating text as this will provoke a debate full of ideas, which we always like to see at the UOC and which identifies the UOC's style - interactive, participative and open - at the start of the academic year. Many thanks to Martin Carnoy and all those taking part.

Even though we can feel legitimately satisfied with the work which everyone - teachers, administrative staff and students - has carried out over the past ten years, the truth is that the world is moving ahead in leaps and bounds. These are certainly worldwide developments which are changing the professional conditions of every place of work, of every person, and which are also transforming the management and organisation of companies and organisations. And this means that we all must follow suit. Students, to take advantage of this new learning opportunity which will foreseeably be the key to new learning processes that will be with them their entire working lives. But also the UOC, because it must, as far as it possibly can, foster research and expansion so that what has been positive for us may continue to be so for many others.

However, what we have already started and what we will be doing soon have their foundations in the quality of what has been done so far. If students - all the students who have attended the University during these ten years - had not benefited from their university experience or if the lecturers had not been able to design the materials and the syllabuses and had not been devoted in an exemplary manner to their students, the UOC's discourse would have no credibility. And we must remember that supporting each academic year there are many successes - both personal and collective - a great deal of work and a rich network of cooperation and coordination among many, which means that we can face a future full of opportunities both for those studying and for those working here. I would like to thank you and congratulate you.

Yet the most important reason for celebrating the start of a new academic year - and therefore a new period of work and effort - is knowing that our work at the UOC will never be isolated or unproductive and nor will it be work that fails to help society as a whole to have more opportunities available to many. In other words, that it is personally productive but also socially useful work.

This is our great responsibility and also our greatest motivation.

Best wishes for the 2004-2005 academic year to everyone.

Rector of the UOC
Gabriel Ferraté