A quarterly publication of AQU Catalunya

91

October 2018

The global impact of technology and the consequent emergence of a new network society has led to an important shift in how higher education is perceived, organized and conducted. Economic globalization has generated a pressure for citizens to acquire and develop very different sets of skills and competences in order to swiftly adjust to changing work environments. Universities are now expected to prepare students for jobs which may not yet exist. At the same time, society’s way of life today requires that educational delivery should be more open, flexible and ubiquitous, too.

The rapid expansion of online learning across universities has been closely linked to this transformation. By allowing the dematerialization and unbundling of educational processes, for institutions it has become a highly efficient, sustainable and ubiquitous way of extending access to quality learning opportunities for all. However it has also entailed new possibilities for continuously innovating and diversifying teaching and learning methodologies. What’s more, online learning has allowed universities to develop new forms of delivery which have a wide-ranging impact on society (for example, MOOCs).

As pointed out by Wheeler (Learning with 'e's, 2015), the introduction of new digital technologies, particularly the Internet and social media, has offered universities many new ways to develop and deliver the knowledge and skills that learners need in the 21st century. Learning has been transformed into a more flexible, contextual, interdependent and personalized experience. In fact, openness, scalability, flexibility and interoperability are critical for educational systems to meet the complex emerging challenges of society.

In this new more sustainable knowledge ecosystem, learners are not only the centre of the learning process but have also become active partners in its selfsame design. We can envisage them playing a more active role in choosing learning pathways, selecting and producing learning resources and supporting and assessing their peers. This personalization is being fostered by the extensive use of artificial intelligence (for example, automatic facilitation and feedback, assessment and credentialing competences). The successful development of the TeSLA system is clear evidence of this trend.

Looking ahead, we can see online learning further expanding and consolidating as it comes to be increasingly used for deeper learning and higher skills development. In fact, higher education has become a hybrid process in which all teaching and learning experiences have a physical and a digital component.

In this emerging context, quality assurance is fundamental to validate good practices and identify what is distinctive in each one. That is why it is paramount that all national accreditation bodies across the EHEA adjust the ESG (ENQA, 2015) to online education provision and providers (Huertas et al., 2018).