Thank you, everyone, for being part of this session.
We are going to have
the presentations in Spanish into in English,
the ones in English are going to be presented online.
We are lucky enough to have the Spanish presenters
here in person
address.
Sandra is going to be the presenter
of the first one.
Yeah.
So let's grab from the U.S.
and from the U.S.
Chair on education and technology for social change
to look at all.
First of all,
I wanted to say good morning, everyone, and especially
thank Phyllis and the Chair for the initiative that I had.
It is a pleasure doing things together.
And in this case we are commenting on the words period.
We got gathered
a group of chairs in October in that city,
and we realized there that we needed to organize events
such as these to find synergies and to support each other
when the institutions
themselves don't see these needs.
Maybe I have so many to thank the words of Miguel.
Indeed,
it has always been very pleasant
to work with unions and I I'm adamant on the idea that we can get further
and we can achieve more if we work hand in hand so
we achieve good results within our contexts.
Oh, it's a little bit in context, but our goals are the same
to help people to provide education to those who don't have access to it.
So we will always find that common ground.
We have to value that over many other things.
And if we can't develop friendships
along the way, that is perfect.
I have prepared a presentation
on the chair
that it is.
My colleagues talked about their universities.
They wanted to say that the Universidad de Catalunya was
opened in 1994 1995.
We began with 200
students with a full online
education model,
and we could do that with the context of the time
where the use of Internet was emerging,
and it seemed that it was
good enough to create communities
that didn't exist before.
Out of these 202 students from two different
junior degrees, we studied, we use
business studies and psycho
biotechnology.
We have five
degrees now, five
in five different fields
and 130,000
students have finished their degrees in our universities.
We believe that our idea was successful enough,
but we had to develop it over time
in accordance to what
the changes are.
So without further reduce
shouldn't be like what do they do?
What is the mission of the invest
chair and education and technology for social change?
It started in 2002
with the name of the e-learning chair.
In 2012, we decided to change its name with the idea of having a degree
that would be more inclusive and less subject
to the usual exchanges of the terminology,
which is something that someone has already mentioned before.
I remember that when I started in the U.S.
we were talking about online
education and
I was told that we couldn't
use that term because education can never be fully online.
So they changed that term
optional.
But in the end, we are talking about distance learning with different
methodologies, different methods using different tools.
And historically that has been the characteristics
of the development of education, using
different technologies for people to be able to access education.
Now we are starting to talk about a I and I am not going to change
the name of the care we have.
It's name education and technology,
which I believe
are going to still be a key factor.
You are going
to see how air is going to condition the development of education
and that social change that is permanent.
The objective of this chair is to promote research, learning
and the dissemination of the intensive use
of educational technologies and how they inflate.
They can affect social change.
Namely, we want to study the evolution of these online
education, its organization, its leadership
and quality.
And in order to do so, we follow
closely the world trends of education
and with the technological resources that support this development.
And we try to support and foster networks
with experts and institutions that are key in this field.
That is the idea that we work on.
So in the end, we want to research and spread
quality practices in the use of these technologies
for education and online education, fostering equality and generating
educational opportunities, especially for
disadvantaged groups.
But those are the main ideas.
We renewed the Chair very recently, so we have some objectives
for 2023, 2026, which are the ones that we have here
participate and being leaders of research projects and spreading
projects, focus on the development of online education,
focusing also on the capabilities and the skills
of professional development of the professors and teachers.
We want to move forward in this study of these new learning
methods through
the framework that the analysis of learning
ecologies provide, create and support.
The development of the creation of collaboration networks does
research and investigate on digital education
in order to guarantee its quality and equality and inclusion
in public works, in forms of books and articles on these topics.
The activities of these Chair are the following
and we work on projects,
and I have only
some of the projects that exist.
They want to comment on the differences
between our chair and the chairs that were
presented before in my university.
I think I could say that in
most of them chairs
compete with other units within these institutions,
even though sometimes they collaborate between each other.
I could name many projects that have to do with online
education in the U.S., but that would be fake. Not.
Not all of those projects come from the chair.
The chair participates in some of them, but these are not
even the these are just
some projects associated to the chair.
I'm not even involved in all of them.
There are other instances within the institution that generate
projects.
Therefore, we cannot sum all of those up.
I publish, for example,
a lot more than
the number of publications that I'm going to talk about later
on, but these are going to be the ones
that come from the chair.
I, I am the director of Feeds
in a partial way.
I also give presentations
and some of these presentations don't have to do with the chair.
And then we have other participants, other stakeholders,
so different people from different research groups
who want to
collaborate with the chair, but they are like the body on a river.
Some days you have water in the river and some of the days you don't.
So these people work with us for some time and then they don't.
So I think this is one of the
questions that we have to bear in mind.
I want to highlight these projects that from 2016
have been very prevalent.
We have been working on them very
ever fully.
We achieved we went through the year
multi rank project and two other projects
to achieve its outcomes, which is the flexible,
universal educational model for a new hybrid.
We wanted the type of education to be
well represented in the university ranks.
We have to say that it is not
well represented in them yet.
We worked in Central Asia in the development
of a learning and teaching,
and it's a friendship center
and in the field of business
studies using online in hybrid
education such as in in countries such as
Kazakhstan,
we had a project focus on Africa
in Uganda and Kenya,
which was essential for the designing of a series of portfolios
that could be used to assess
the skills of
students, to apply them
in in work contexts.
Then we participate in the digital approach
regarding professional development and learning and teaching,
online learning and teaching.
And now we are working on a project
called Fluent,
a flexible, universal educational model for a new hybrid.
We realize that too many institutions are moving forward or towards
hybrid models are fully online models,
but they do not come about in the correct way.
So we said, okay, let's
everyone do whatever they want, but we should establish
some frameworks so that our work can be carried out in a better way.
And for us to understand the complexity
of translating anything from an in-person model
to an online model, it is not only a matter of,
okay, so
the class that I was given in person, I'm going to give it online.
It is more complex than that,
not only for the professor or the teacher, but also for the students
that need to develop their alter regulation
and autonomy models.
They probably
weren't prepared for that before.
So there is a series of elements that has to be carried
in mind by that hybrid or fully online model.
We want for things to be quick, but sometimes they cannot be so.
So these are the projects that we are involved in and part
of, let's say, the budget of the functioning
of of this chair comes from these projects.
All of these projects are financed by the European Commission,
and so they do not provide you with margins with
for other part of the Chair You have to do in internal,
you have to strike an internal balance
aside from doing what you have to do,
you have to try and use these efforts for other projects,
some other things that we do, our seminars and webinars.
We organize an international seminar every year since 2017.
In 2017, for example, we organized one of our own evidence
based research in 2018 about lifelong learning.
How does our society learn?
And there we launched the idea of the work
that we had been done since 2015 on different
educational methodologies and other publications about it.
In 2019, we started talking about what we now call
a I, and the seminar was about,
Oh, hi, it is Alexa, what do you want to learn?
So we asked ourselves if in the future
we will have robot teachers and we see the direction of these trends
or these topic.
Then we did a seminar in 2020 in Barranquilla
in as a matter of the Cynthia Bond
series of webinars about in-person teaching.
These were ten webinars that were very successful
in terms of participation and the
subsequent viewings of these webinars
that in 2021 we focus on data and the data used by institutions,
educational institutions to identify how teachers or professors
should know
all the work related to data and analytics.
And then we also designed and organized a series of webinars
on innovative education for shaped futures.
In 2022, the the webinar was about retail
educational leadership highlighting the role of leadership
on digital
education, but also saying that
higher education is in higher education institutions
a comprehension or a knowledge on
why digital education is does not exist
necessarily.
So sometimes the right questions are not asked
and therefore we do not receive the necessary answers.
And in 2033 we organized a
webinar on inclusion and the use of technology support
learning in order to identify the risks,
but also the potentials of this type of education.
But also we wanted to defend that on the
online
education, the uses of technology is
used for people discrimination,
but for the opposite to include
a lot of people and to provide them with the opportunities
that they would not have access to otherwise.
Other activities of the Chair are the publications we publish.
The seven years in the last years,
some of them have been translated
between Catalan in Spanish, but also to Basque
English and
except the last one,
the other books are open access and you can download them very easily.
Our information has always been to spread this knowledge and to
sit in a
place of easy access for everyone.
And also in these past four years
we publish four chapters in books and 23 articles,
and these were the result of the work of the chair of the chair
in magazines such as the ones that we are here.
So from that we have a series of
collaboration and teaching activities,
and then we're building activities
and we have
more commercial activities on learning
at colleges and universities of Spain, Colombia and Italy.
Digital leadership in the UK, Canada and in Italy.
And we also carry out activities of training and counseling
in Colombia, Chile, Cyprus and the US webinars,
for example, the American Center of Distance Education.
And we also direct seizes in different parts of the world.
Aside from Spain, we have Colombia, Chile, Croatia,
Italy, the Philippines, Costa Rica, Romania,
and we see here a
possibility of people to have a it's
if this is directed
by a European university, then we have an
international counseling board that is going to change
in a matter of time.
We had a brand, the great lady, the ex rector of the Open University
in the UK.
It's going to a professor at the University of Newcastle, Frank
Reid, the ex-president of the
educational boards of the
Catalonia.
And we told the rector of the Open University of Catalonia.
We also want to
insert some generational change into these board.
It is a new chair of 21 years of existence.
We could have done many more things that the things that we have done,
but we have clear limitations. So
it would be
it would it would be senseless to
take these limitations.
The chair is specializing in online and hybrid education.
As of late, it has few resources, but it is very active.
We try to use all the options that we have out of reach
and we are open for collaboration with other chairs and institutions.
Without a doubt is
we also
try to work in fields
that are not necessarily so specific.
We all agree that a very future
line is the macroprudential topic.
However, we are more worried
not only about that, but
providing a sense of macro to micro.
That means that we have to know our contexts where
we are situated.
What is the role that this is going to play
in the context that we are part of,
and that in that way we could link that to the rest of the
teaching or educational
curriculum in a way that would make sense for everyone.
So we follow
different initiatives, but we have to ask the question
what is
the link of this
initiative to the rest of the ones that we are working on?
We have to study all these and participate
in all of these with these macro
points.
A few of these was my presentations
and I would be very glad to answer to any of your doubts after this.
Thank you very much for your attention.