Spain from Re.ViCa

The Spanish Academic Landscape

This potential of new technologies in the complex but crucial itinerary to the European Higher Education Area was stressed, in a national context in Spain, by the well known and polemical Bricall Report4, one of the basic preparatory documents for the subsequent Ley Orgánica de Universidades (L.O.U., 2001). In spite of the most critical aspects of this law5, the fact is that the whole chapter IX was devoted to the potential of ICT and its consequences for the next future of the Spanish university within the all pervading horizon of the European convergence.6 Since then, a number of documents have pointed at the potential of eLearning, while the development of distance learning programmes and units almost everywhere in the academic environment and beyond, coincide with a series of important processes for the Spanish universities:

• An increasing tendency to bring the academic world closer to society (as the proliferation of the number and relevance of the University-Enterprise foundations shows), including the general concern towards the need of an improvement of linguistic, communicational and computer-related competences within the university community;

• A clear invitation to shift the traditional teaching-oriented paradigm to a more flexible learning-oriented one;

• A determined will to reform the system of postgraduate studies and foster its importance in the education and better qualification of the professionals;

• The stress on the role that virtual education is to play according to the prospects of a lifelong learning kind of society. That chapter also stressed the integration of ICT and the need to trust international cooperation through university networks, casting additional interesting arguments under the conviction that “Society expects from the new university graduates an awareness of the influence of the various forms of management of these technologies in their respective disciplines, as well as the requested knowledge and qualification to make use of these technologies” (Bricall 2000, 454). The three wide areas of the university environment where the impact of ICT was to be perceived were:

• the production and distribution of contents, both in education and in research,

• the teaching/learning models, and

• the organisational model.

Among the most symptomatic issues and observations raised by this text, we would like to underline the following:

• The ‘pressure’ or competition from the non-academic providers of ICT in higher education, become increasingly intensive in these organisations;

• The many actions taken by traditional universities concerning the integration of ICT, are not well supported by explicit and clear institutional general policies. In this sense, it is very much recommended to have a clear educational policy, based on the screening of addressees and the identification of the goals and the choice of the kind of technology to be used;

• The strong resistance of teaching and administrative staff to the introduction of ICT in the academic pedagogical and organisational model;

• The recommendation of the search for models combining traditional face-to-face teaching with distance learning modules (blended formulas);

• The prospects of future growth for higher education will emerge from the continuous professional education needs;

• In order to maximise the investments needed in this process of innovation, the engagement of universities in larger networks or consortiums with other universities in an international framework, and/or with public institutions and/or with private organisations was promoted. ICT is perceived as a means to facilitate the organisation and implementation of international ICT based courses. The idea of a virtual Erasmus is already into motion and one of the major challenges in this process.

3 e-Learning, Designing Tomorrow’s Education , op. cit. 4 Josep M. Bricall (2001), Informe Universidad 2000, better known as the Bricall Report, commissioned by the CRUE (Conferencia de Rectores de las Universidades Españolas). 5 The L.O.U. was approved under the Partido Popular (PP) government (1996-2004) and has been recently reformed under the new socialist one (PSOE, 2006). The big political and social debate around this law was due mainly to its strong top-bottom general approach, a certain favouritism for private universities and the complex and expensive centralization of the system of public academic competition. 6 Chapter IX, Redes tecnológicas y redes universitarias, p. 253-279.

Distance learning universities

- Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

http://www.uoc.edu

- Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

http://www.uned.es/webuned/areasgen/info/english2.htm (English)

ANCED - Asociación Nacional de Centros de e-Learning y Distancia

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