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Education Tech Research Dev (2010) 58:781–790

DOI 10.1007/s11423-010-9169-y

INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

A model of equitable and sustainable redistribution


of knowledge

Ana Marı́a Delgado Garcı́a • Rafael Oliver Cuello

Published online: 16 September 2010


 Association for Educational Communications and Technology 2010

Abstract Education is one of the pillars in which a Welfare State is effectively based on
in order to achieve an equitable distribution of wealth. In contemporary society, knowledge
and education are among the most appreciated goods, and everyone should have the right
to acquire them, without distinction of gender, race, age, health or religion. From our
experience of over 15 years at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya we can claim that
virtual learning makes access to education easier for certain population strata, whereas
otherwise, they would be excluded from such a right. A very significant group of students
to consider are women with family burdens who, thanks to this kind of education, are able
to gain access to higher education for the first time in their lives and at their maturity ages.
Another significant group is students with disabilities, for whom virtual education makes it
possible to get training in fields for which it would be more difficult to get in the case of the
non-virtual university. Geographic factors are also relevant, since virtual education has
provided rural areas and other places with poor infrastructures with a chance to gain access
to higher education. This brings with it a redistribution of wealth among territories, and
also among different social strata with fewer resources and limitations to commute long
distances to higher education institutions. Another issue that needs pointing out is virtual
communication. As it is asynchronic, it can lead to a high degree of reflection. All these
elements enable us to have a virtual discussion about cultural and linguistic issues which
have huge educational value.

Keywords Higher education  Virtual education  Equity  Redistribution of knowledge

A. M. Delgado Garcı́a (&)


Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain
e-mail: adelgadoga@uoc.edu

R. Oliver Cuello
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain
e-mail: rafael.oliver@upf.edu

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782 A. M. Delgado Garcı́a, R. Oliver Cuello

Introduction

In the early 1990s, the Catalan Government was the motor for the creation of new uni-
versities. The aim was for these universities to have their roots in Catalonia, in order to
decentralise the university system and to foster economic and cultural development
throughout the territory, specifically through the founding of higher education training and
research centres in peripheral territories. The ultimate goal was to make the university
system as a whole more dynamic.
The new universities that were founded at that time as a result of this political decision
were, in chronological order of their creation: Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, the
University of Girona, the University of Lleida, Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, the
Open University of Catalonia (UOC), Ramon Llull University in Barcelona, the University
of Vic, and the International University of Catalonia, in Barcelona. These universities have
served as real motors for economic, demographic, technological and town planning
development and have therefore also had a positive educational, cultural and social effect
on the areas in which they were set up.
One significant example of the success of Catalan university policy in the 1990s is the
creation of the UOC (www.uoc.edu), the first virtual University in Spain. It is an entirely
virtual, online, university (Tiffin and Rajasingham 2003), and it follows the trail opened up
by other virtual universities which appeared in other countries, in what is known as the
third generation of distance learning (Kaufman 1989; Nipper 1989), the one that owes its
growth to Internet (Bates 2005).
From the very beginning, UOC’s mission was to ensure equal access to higher education
and knowledge for all sectors of society using information and communications technology
(ICT), making ICT an essential tool for democratising education in the knowledge society.
It is important to remember that this university was born with a strong will to provide an
adequate response to the educational needs of lifelong learning, and to make the best
possible use of the great potential that the internet offers us when it comes to developing
and providing education. In particular, the main distinguishing feature of the UOC, since
its creation, is its educational model, which is learner-centered. This model responds to the
need to provide the university with a strong identity of its own and to try to establish a
methodology that can overcome the shortcomings of traditional institutions for distance
learning in Spain. Moreover, the educational model also tries to suit university students’
profiles, and it takes into consideration social and technological factors at the time of its
creation, thus striving to guarantee non-discrimination concerning accessibility to tech-
nology. In this respect, the students are the protagonists of the training process, by man-
aging their own time, planning their own studying pace and building their own academic
itinerary.
The pillars on which this educational model was built, based on learning activities, are
flexibility of time and space, personalization, interactivity and cooperation. And the values
that UOC is committed to are diversity, participation, quality, innovation, and sustainability.
The university has an online community of around 10,000 students, teachers, and
collaborators, spread over more than 50 countries, making it a multicultural institution
focused on an international environment.
As far as what it has to offer in education, it is made up of over 850 undergraduate,
postgraduate, doctorate and other programs. Currently there are courses in Catalan,
Spanish, English, and French.
20 years after the Catalan Government created these universities, there is unanimous
consensus on the relevant role that these higher education centres have played in their

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A model of equitable and sustainable redistribution of knowledge 783

respective territories, becoming motors for the training of the region’s human resources in
order to foster culture and knowledge. This mission, to be accomplished by all of the
universities with close links to the territory, was called the ‘‘Third Mission’’.
Education is one of the cornerstones of a Welfare State which aims to succeed in
attaining equal distribution of wealth. In present-day society, knowledge and education are
the most highly valued assets which everyone should be entitled to, regardless of their
gender, race, age, health or religion.
This is why we feel that what is required today is a continuation of this progress. We must
consider how higher-education institutions can go further in fulfilling their social function
beyond the borders of their own territory and accomplish their mission without heed to
traditional physical barriers. The aim should be the genuinely equitable distribution of
knowledge, overcoming gender, age, race, language, health, religious and wealth barriers.

The political framework

In the Communiqué of the Conference of European Ministers Responsible for Higher


Education, which took place in Bergen on the 19 and 20 May 2005, the importance of
research in the European university framework was underlined in order to ensure the
economic and cultural development of our societies and for social cohesion. In this
communiqué, the Ministers renewed their commitment to making quality higher education
equally accessible to all, and to guaranteeing the conditions required for students to
complete their studies, regardless of social and economic background.
The communiqué states therefore that governments should take appropriate measures to
help the socially most disadvantaged students. It also emphasises the notion of interna-
tional academic cooperation, in which academic values should prevail. This communiqué
underlines the importance of intercultural understanding and respect.
In order to achieve this, we must preserve the richness of our cultural heritage and our
linguistic diversity in the construction of a knowledge-based society. In today’s complex
societies, the task of higher education should respond to the principle of public
responsibility.
Similarly, the Communiqué of the G8 Ministerial Meeting on Education, held in
Moscow on the 1 and 2 June 2006, stated that education is critically important for creating
an inclusive society and that it underpins civil society and sustains and enriches cultures.
Education is the pillar on which a society based on mutual respect and understanding can
be built.
In addition, this document also emphasises the importance of ICT for advancing quality
education and in the understanding of civic values, stating that education at all levels
should promote social and intercultural skills and understanding of and respect for the
values and the history of other cultures and societies. Lastly, the document underlines the
need for a commitment to linguistic and intercultural competences.
Furthermore, applying ICT in higher education, as in other areas, involves new chal-
lenges and opportunities for transmitting scientific knowledge, particularly affecting
learning methodologies and processes. That is why The Sorbonne Joint Declaration points
out that ‘‘Undergraduates should have access to a diversity of programmes, including
opportunities for multidisciplinary studies, development of a proficiency in languages and
the ability to use new information technologies’’.
Along these lines, according to the EU Commission (Commission Communiqué
‘‘Mobilise the intellectual capital of Europe: create the necessary conditions so that

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784 A. M. Delgado Garcı́a, R. Oliver Cuello

universities can fully contribute towards the Lisbon strategy’’, COM/2005/152), ‘‘it is
necessary to take full advantage of the potential strengths of ICT in teaching and learning,
including permanent learning. The division in two cycles (graduate and masters) makes it
possible to diversify the contents of programmes and learning methods (learning based on
research, the use of ICT)’’.
Moreover, point 30 of the European Parliament Resolution on Universities and Higher
Education in the European Space for Knowledge (2001/2174/INI) recommends support for
distance learning in higher education, the use of new technologies for degree programmes
and facilities for access to education, according to certain norms and procedures.
Bringing ICT into university education today has become an essential element for all
universities, since using ICT enhances adaptation to the requirements of the European
Space for Higher Education (ESHE). We believe that the idea of combining classroom
hours with virtual tuition should be connected to the introduction of the European credit
system, that is, with the intention of counting not only teaching hours but also the student’s
work. To this end, we believe that in the convergence process towards ESHE it will be
essential that all the traditional universities provide education virtually and face-to-face
simultaneously.

Virtual education

The use of ICTs in higher education makes it possible to acquire knowledge at any time
and place, depending on the availability of time and on students’ educational needs.
Thus, the main advantages of ICTs are the following:
1. It is a way of adapting to students’ needs, since it enables them to combine
professional, personal and family commitments with their academic ones.
2. It is more flexible for students, who can study anywhere (at home, at work), and at any
time (workday, weekend, holiday, daytime, night-time…). In other words, e-learning
does away with inflexible timetables (asynchrony) and can overcome geographical
obstacles (Kramer 2002).
3. It also saves travelling to the campus site, thus saving time (even administrative
paperwork can be done via internet). This facilitates continuity in learning.
4. It also favours sustainability because it reduces transportation to the university, saving
on energy and contamination by fossil fuels. Further, most of the documentation is
stored and presented electronically and keeps from creating waste paper.
5. Thanks to all these factors, new possibilities open up for those who have little time or
find it difficult to attend class, because of their job, a disability or another personal
reason. Thus, there is a ‘‘democratization of higher education’’.
6. The learning process is not only more flexible, but also more personalised, attention is
more individual, as students set their own pace for studying, according to their needs
(Pelgrum and Anderson 2001).
Education via the internet is a necessity, if we take into account current changes in our
society. In its first years, on-line education was considered a poor alternative to classroom-
based learning (Salmon 2002). However, today the perception of this type of learning
among the university community is increasingly positive. This is because on-line learning
has proven to be an education model that brings students increasingly close to attaining the
educational objectives of the knowledge society, given that the professional world has
opted for the wholehearted incorporation of new technologies into its everyday activities.

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A model of equitable and sustainable redistribution of knowledge 785

Furthermore, it is a model whereby methodologies and adequate educational resources that


ensure quality learning are a key component.
The success of the model of virtual education can be seen, firstly, in the growing
appearance of new virtual universities in a large number of countries; secondly, in the
widespread use that all non-virtual universities are adding, more and more, of information
and communication technologies in their training, so much so that nowadays they too offer
exclusively virtual tuition as well as face-to-face and blended learning. Thirdly, because it
is a model that, given its circumstances, has incorporated with great ease, the directives of
the ESHE.
Ensuring that students can navigate easily and confidently in virtual learning environ-
ments is no longer purely a tool that is very valuable for education, but is now an essential
requirement of the new knowledge-based society in which it is necessary not only to have
the sources of information available, but also to be in control of their increasingly complex
management.
Distance education systems have always taken the profiles of their students into account
more than classroom-based education systems. The explanation for this is that distance
universities provided an alternative to classroom-based learning in the form of a system in
which efforts were made to personalise the learning process as much as possible.
Today, in a world where students are becoming the focus of the model throughout the
European higher education system, it is clear that this concern, which was initially
exclusive to distance learning systems, should be shared by every higher education system,
regardless of whether or not they offer education that is virtual, face-to-face or blended. It
is not a question of coming up with a new theory for learning in online education, but
rather of making the best of the opportunities that arise with the addition of the ICTs in
universities, in order to think carefully and creatively about the pedagogical model, and to
become aware of how the conventional teaching model and the virtual one converge (Tait
and Mills 1999). Indeed, conventional education promotes passive learning (Hannum and
Briggs 1982), whereas ICTs make teaching and learning more dynamic, interactive, and
innovative (Cooshna and Teelock 2008). Thus, technology is the key to renovating higher
education (Daniel 1996).

Virtual student profile for the UOC

Ever since its foundation, in 1994, the UOC has been geared to the offer of non-presence-
based education. Its educational model revolves around an Internet-based methodology
that provides students the resources and tools necessary for them to be able to learn,
without requiring them to be physically present in a classroom or to coincide, in terms of
time, with others involved in the educational process. This is achieved with the intensive
use of ICTs, leading to a virtual learning process by exchanging information in common
virtual spaces. Thus, academic objectives are accomplished in a flexible, continuous
manner, which does not depend on coinciding in time or space.
One of the aspects that distinguish the UOC model from presence-based higher edu-
cation is that virtual education fosters the use of technology in the relevant field of study.
As technological competence is nowadays one of the critical, generic competences in all
HE programs and a common requirement of the workforce, said feature of virtual edu-
cation at the UOC promotes the smooth introduction of graduates into the labour market.
The UOC has over 45,000 students from 45 countries and 15,000 graduates. Distribu-
tion of students by age is as follows: 13% are under 25; 26% are between 25 and 30; 40%

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are between 30 and 40; and 21% are over 40. On the other hand, 50% of them are women
and 50% are men, and 93% of these students work over 30 h a week.
As for the pedagogical model, the students are provided with a wide range of resources
to do well in their subjects: the tutor gives each student personalised guidance; the teacher
walks the student through the learning process; the syllabus design for each subject defines
a working methodology and assessment criteria; evaluation is constantly being carried out;
virtual campus enables interaction with the whole university community; the course
materials and information resources are available in the virtual library.
Over 15 years of experience in the UOC, during which time the education available has
been personalised to suit the students as much as possible, have shown us that virtual
education brings education to specific strata of the population that would otherwise be
excluded from it.
One very significant group is that of female students with heavy family responsibilities
who are entering higher education for the first time at a later age, thanks to this type of
education.
Another significant group is students with major disabilities, for whom virtual education
provides an opportunity of education in disciplines to which access would previously have
been impossible (Booth and Ainscow 1998).
The geographical element is also very important, since virtual education has brought the
possibility of access to higher education to rural areas and areas where the infrastructure is
poor. This means better distribution of wealth throughout the country and between the
different layers of society who do not have the resources to travel to higher education centres.
Another significant element is that virtual communication allows for a high level of
reflection, since it is not affected by images and is asynchronous. These elements provide a
space for very educationally valuable virtual discussions on complex cultural and linguistic
subjects that might not be dealt with in other types of education.
This type of virtual teaching allows students to get to know a virtual environment that
will make them more predisposed to continue learning in the future, thus fostering a
lifelong learning process.
In addition, this type of virtual education enables students to gain linguistic skills in
different foreign languages easily and with no major investments by the students them-
selves or by the universities.

European Space for Higher Education and the UOC teaching methodology

The ESHE is for students to acquire certain competences throughout their training period
that will prepare them for a professional career. This requires a curricular design based on
competences and a set of teaching methods that are pursuant to these goals. In this new
educational scenario, greater emphasis is laid on what the student learns than on what the
teacher teaches. In this context, it is worth remembering the pedagogical theory of the
oppressed. It proposes that everyone involved in the educational process educate and are
educated at the same time. In this new dynamic, which breaks with a fundamentally
narrative and discursive type of education, those receiving education become active agents
in the educational process. In this way, students overcome their passive attitude in edu-
cation as mere receivers of knowledge and they adopt a critical and reflexive stance based
on dialogue and communication with the teacher (Freire 1972).
What we have said about the curricula design based on competences implies that
activities that were traditionally taken care of by the teacher are no longer at the fore, and

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A model of equitable and sustainable redistribution of knowledge 787

what the student has to do becomes more important. And what the student has to do to
acquire certain competences is to put them into practice and this can only be done by
repeating activities designed specifically for that purpose. Indeed, a competence can only
be evaluated if we place a student in a situation where it is manifested and this can only
happen if certain activities are developed over a period of time.
Thus, the student’s learning effort becomes the center of the process and, more spe-
cifically, when it is a well-sequenced set of activities carried out by the student. In this
regard, a magnificent motivational weapon for the student is evaluation, since students tend
to adjust their learning according to the way they are going to be evaluated.
So, the best strategy to get students to develop a set of competences is to ask them to
carry out a series of learning activities (some for evaluation, but not all) whereby they will
be developing and acquiring, step by step, higher levels of mastery of these competences.
Further, such activities must enable students to put into practice, more or less directly, the
contents they have been working on in order to guarantee their assimilation, and they must
also lead to a more or less important reflexive process.
It is also important to point out that the rest of the elements that play a role in any
learning process (the teacher’s role, the function of the tools and resources to be used, the
role of communication processes with the rest of the students…) are organized around the
design and implementation of the learning activities, which are a key element in the UOC
educational model.
Now, a determining element in the success of the evaluation is whether it is focused
coherently with all of the other elements of the learning process and whether it is in tune
with the main learning objectives. Traditionally, evaluation has focused on the final stage
of learning (summative assessment), and, generally, has been conceived more for passing
than for learning. However, the teacher should not evaluate only at the end of the learning
process how much knowledge has been taken in and how well the students’ competences
have developed, but throughout the course, rather, the teacher should provide activities on
a regular basis, to be evaluated, that will facilitate gradual assimilation of the contents for
the course and development and the competences to be achieved. In short, through this
system of continuous evaluation (formative assessment) the teacher can keep up a closer
and better tracking of a student’s learning progress. Consequently, we believe that the
introduction of these competences in university teaching constitutes a good opportunity to
promote continuous evaluation.
In virtual teaching environments, as the student is at the centre of the learning process,
we have always favoured supporting keeping track by means of student formative
assessment, as it has proved to be a better guarantee of success at the end of the course.
However, face-to-face universities should also make an effort to apply this evaluation
method in the framework of ESHE.

Education for sustainability: the virtual EcoUniversity

In our present-day society, characterized by social and environmental problems, it is


essential to learn how to live sustainably. To achieve this, there is no denying the important
role of education, as a means of providing the right perception of our problems and a way
to promoting favourable attitudes and behaviour for achieving a sustainable development
(Aikenhead 1985).
In this context, the EcoUniversity of the UOC is an educational project born in late
2008. It intends to provide an academic format for scientific, technological, social,

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economic, and commercial ideas in order to achieve environmental sustainability. Its


objective is to research and develop new models and new practices of social and envi-
ronmental sustainability.
The initial working areas for this project are: philosophy, politics and thought; clean and
renewable energies; health; agriculture; economics and finance; architecture; environ-
mental law; education and commerce. In addition it is structured according to five main
domains: experiences and practical implementation (EcoCampus); studies, research; sen-
sitization and dissemination; technical support for public institutions, companies; service
sector and general public.
The goal for this project is to boost real changes and provide tools of survival within the
boundaries of our planet by means of comprehensive education for people. To this end, the
main objectives are the following: train agents for change, educate people on a spiritual
level, a social-community level, and an environmental one (mind, body, and emotions),
generate critical thinking towards dominant existing discourse, provide tools and propose
alternatives, and, finally, create a community in this area.
To reach this goal work groups have been set up. In them, experts debate specific
proposals to turn the objectives into something tangible. However, we must stress that
today the EcoUniversity is still a project, which has not yet crystallized into a concrete
educational reality.
Be that as it may, at present, some summer courses are already being offered, and
subjects of the degree courses on environmental sustainability but not within the Eco-
university project. For example, for the last 3 years, there is a subject being offered as part
of the Degree in Law on Environmental Studies, and a summer course has been offered on
tax revenue and the environment. It is hard to know what the real impact of these subjects
and courses is, since they are still very recent initiatives.

Virtual student exchange

Lastly, the UOC has longstanding experience in exchange programs with foreign students.
So far, relationships have been mostly with the area of Latin America, but virtual and
multilingual learning make it possible to start international exchanges with European
students.
Traditionally, the language barrier conditioned university students when deciding to
participate in student exchange programmes such as the Erasmus programme. Clearly,
among the many factors that students take into account when deciding to participate in an
international exchange, the knowledge of other languages is one of the most important, in
particular the language of the host country (Le Poder Avanti 2006).
Universities that provide virtual learning, either exclusively or in combination with
classroom-based learning, provide new possibilities for exchanges among university stu-
dents through the web. We have read on many occasions that ICT enables students to study
in a digital world in which there are no geographical barriers; but cultural and language
barriers still exist.
This type of virtual exchange is not intended as an alternative to face-to-face exchanges,
but as a new type of exchange that will allow students to achieve different aims and
objectives to those already provided for by exchanges in person. These are two different
types of university exchange which at the same time complement each other.
This type of virtual exchange would allow students to get to know different virtual
environments which would equip them with a predisposition for later learning in other on-

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A model of equitable and sustainable redistribution of knowledge 789

line contexts that are different but with obvious common characteristics. One of the
challenges of the new European Higher Education Area is to encourage and prepare current
students to continue the learning process throughout their lives.
The most recent studies show that this type of learning usually takes place in virtual
environments, which means that if current students are already familiar with this type of
environment, it will be easier for them to continue to use them for learning when they have
embarked on a career. In addition, this type of exchange will enable students to develop
their language skills, particularly their receptive skills, easily and with no major invest-
ments by the students themselves or by the universities.
Moreover, this type of exchange will enable the most economically disadvantaged
students to enjoy an experience of this type, as it avoids the costs arising from a journey
abroad and accommodation in another city.
This would require a teacher with a passive knowledge of several languages, as he or
she would have to be able to read and correct the activities that are part of continuous
evaluation as well as the student’s final test, to be written in the language of his or her
choice (either the mother tongue or a second language), and also attend to his or her
messages. Another possibility would be to have more than one teacher in a classroom who
knew different languages. A complementary resource for this classroom would obviously
be to count on machine translation for several languages, available to the teacher and the
students alike.
However, the ultimate aim of this type of exchange would be to help students to develop
communicative intercultural skills (Cohen and Cohen 1986; Banks 1988). Indeed, in a
virtual exchange classroom, each student will express themselves in their own language,
but they will practice the art of understanding the interventions of students from other
cultures, in a foreign language (Delgado et al. 2006). We cannot forget that language and
culture are intertwined and it is difficult to understand one without the other (Bentley et al.
2005). In this respect, according to Sapir’s theory, individuals are submitted, to a great
extent, by the demands of each particular language which constitutes the means of
expression of the society they belong to; and it is inaccurate to think that it is possible to
get in touch with reality without resorting to language since it is the instrument that allows
us to solve problems that are characteristic of communication or thought (Sapir 1929).
Understanding between participants in the classroom will not be perfect; in fact
understanding could often be affected by some degree of uncertainty. This uncertainty is
acceptable if we take into account the benefits that learning to respect the differences
between cultures implies.
In our experience of virtual teaching, we have been able to witness how online com-
munication facilitates interrelationships within the educational community because it is not
affected by the image or the presence of the group. And because of this, the educational
wealth of this online experience comes from the possibility of being able to set up a
collaborative learning network of students where everyone learns and teaches at the same
time, each student starting from his or her own reality, surroundings and setting, and also by
comparing the differences and points of view brought to bear by other cultures or realities.

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Ana Marı́a Delgado Garcı́a is a Professor at the Department of Law and Political Science at the Universitat
Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. Her research interests concern the new educational frame brought
about by the convergence towards the European Space for Higher Education.

Rafael Oliver Cuello is a Professor at the Department of Law at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona,
Spain. His research interests concern the design of assessment by competence-based work, particularly in
continuous assessment.

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