The Future of Higher Education

Summary:

Summary dialogue  How to implement the culture of lifelong learning in the Spanish higher education system? in which the following participated Sebastián Royo, Mercedes Delgado, Ángel Cabrera, President and Elena Herrero-Beaumont (moderator).

On 25 November 2021, the Rafael del Pino Foundation organised the dialogue "How to implement the culture of lifelong learning in the higher education system", with the participation of Sebastián Royo, Provost of Clark University; Mercedes Delgado, from the Copenhagen Business School and the MIT Innovation Initiative; and Ángel Cabrera, President of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Mercedes Delgado: Criteria must be defined to help define what lifelong learning is. The first must be related to the demand for future work. The Spanish economy, like that of other advanced countries, is transforming towards an economy of services with a high technological content. We have to be able to ensure that workers have the skills that are needed in these services. We also have to take into account, as a criterion, structural changes, such as the green transition. It is an opportunity, but it also requires a new type of skills. The third criterion is that not all occupations need the same upgrading. There are some occupations where knowledge is changing faster, such as in biomedicine, and others where there is less urgency to update these skills. The last criterion is that needs will vary regionally.

Sebastián Royo: In Spain we do not have a problem of investment in education. As a percentage of GDP it is comparable to that of the countries around us. The issue is more the type of education we offer. The key issue is vocational training, vocational training. In Spain we have a huge deficit, it is still discredited, considered by society as something secondary, but it is essential to provide opportunities for students who do not have the ability or interest to access higher education and develop professional careers. And it is not only about access to employability, but also about reducing inequalities. In countries where vocational education has been more successful, such as Sweden or Denmark, it has been important in reducing inequalities. It is an area where there is still a big deficit and a lot of room for improvement.

Ángel Cabrera: Lifelong learning is vital to the health of any economy. If we choose any place in the world where companies are investing heavily, where there is vibrant start-ups, where venture capitalists are going to look for opportunities, the place that has been identified is a place with a high concentration of talent and a leading research university. There is no other way. In the economy we live in, which depends on productivity and innovation, the biggest competitive element is how many skilled people you have and what the dynamics of producing ideas are. We have created an economy that requires that and it turns out that the advanced economies of Europe with the ageing population, and even the American economy where, for the first time in decades, the number of university students is declining, just at the time when we need more education is when the leading economies are having the most difficulties. So either you make people have access to education, or you make people who are already in the workforce continue to invest in education.

At Georgia Tech, a technological university, one of the largest research universities in the United States, the first thing we did was to accept our obligation. The traditional model of universities says that they are dedicated to training eighteen-year-old students who are given a career and that's it. That is the traditional model, but what Georgia Tech has done is to say that its role goes much further because, firstly, it has the responsibility to see that there are people who are not going to university, such as ethnic minorities, or women who are still not going to technical careers, and, secondly, it has to see what to do with the professional throughout the career. Six years ago they did an experiment by creating a Masters in computer science for professional people at a fraction of the cost of the original Masters and in an online format. When this was first proposed, it seemed like the end of the world, offering the programme for $7,000, a quarter of what the traditional master's degree would cost. The result is that it is now the largest master's degree in the world. Then we launched another one in data analytics and another one in cybersecurity, and between the three of them we have 17,000 students doing those masters, which is almost half of all students at the university and is the big source of growth in the number of students when the number of students is declining in the state of Georgia.

Mercedes Delgado: One of the initiatives that is becoming very popular is free online education. We have EdX, in which important Spanish universities are involved, but more presence is needed there. They are very good courses for global vocational training. Another initiative is that we need more collaboration between universities and industry. For example, there is a specific programme at Copenhagen Business School that allows students who graduated years ago to continue training because they are involved in the students' theses, where they are examiners. It is an opportunity for them to see new frameworks, new theories, new applications and the student, society and the university benefit from this collaboration. Finally, in Denmark, at Copenhagen Business School, there is a lot of emphasis on what they call the Nordic values, how they teach empathy, sustainability, understanding the complexity of society's problems and that is an essential part of the curriculum they are developing.

Sebastián Royo: The most interesting thing in the United States are the competency-based programmes, which are online programmes in which students, instead of having a credit system, have to demonstrate that they have mastered the competencies they are studying. Students can join the programmes at any time. The programmes are taught by specialists, they do not require professors with doctorates, they have the flexibility that they can be developed as students demonstrate their competences, as they progress, and thus they obtain qualifications and certifications that allow them to access a job. They have a very low cost because of the modality in which they are taught and they are very successful in terms of access. In the European case, if we look at employability and inequality criteria, the best known model is that of Sweden, with an integrated vocational training model in schools. Students obtain generic skills which are then trained by companies and which, at the same time, give access to higher education. This system is different from the one in Germany, where you have a vocational training system in which trade unions, länder and companies are integrated, which is very successful but which is closed to higher education. Those two cases are the most paradigmatic in terms of employability and inequality. The Danish case is a mixture of the two.

Angel Cabrera: Education has several objectives that are equally important. Georgia Tech's mission is to produce leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. We cannot fulfil that mission if we do not produce graduates who understand what aspects of the human condition need to be improved, what is happening with economic inequality or climate change. We can't develop leaders if they don't have empathy, if they don't have the capacity to understand what the impact of technologies is on what's going on around them. So they are proud that technology students also have to study philosophy, ethics. So there is no trade-off between science and humanities because you have to do both.

Sebastián Royo: Clark University's mission is to challenge convention and change the world. You can't change the world if you focus only on technology. One thing we have to learn from what is happening with the pandemic is that we need much more humanity and much more empathy. We have a responsibility to fully educate our students, not only in the field of technology but also in the field of humanities. There is another approach that is very wrong. The pressure for lifelong learning is the fear of losing one's job, of becoming obsolete, of not being able to change careers, of not being promoted. That is the wrong approach. The people who are going to succeed in their careers are the most motivated people, who are going to be eager to learn and to create knowledge. From this point of view, the integral training of the individual, including the humanistic aspect, is key for them.

Mercedes Delgado: The high-paying jobs that are being created in the United States are jobs with technological content, which require skills such as engineering or mathematics. So we need those kinds of skills. The problem is that we are often training the population, but we are not using it efficiently. For example, in the United States, a lot of women are trained in science and technology, but you don't see them in patents, in being used to innovate and solve important problems nationally and globally. Digital skills are important because companies are transforming. The jobs of the future are going to have a lot of digital content, but you need both science and humanities. The idea of lifelong learning is to see where Spanish society has an imbalance, in this case in digital skills. Therefore, the emphasis on digital skills is justified.

Sebastián Royo: A profound change that is taking place in the world of business is the strategic shift from a focus on shareholders to a focus on communities. The companies that are going to be most successful in the future will be those that focus on their communities, not just on producing the maximum profit for shareholders, but on the impact their activities have on the communities in which they are operating. In the last decades, they have only focused on shareholders. One of the reasons why we are in such polarised societies is because of increasing inequalities. Many companies are realising the impact of these decisions and realising that it is unsustainable.

Ángel Cabrera: There is a world before COVID and another one after. In the United States, many people are disappearing from the labour market. They don't want to work, they are going home, and the percentage of people who consider themselves active is falling. Now companies are figuring out how to convince people to keep working. Everybody has that problem. So those desires that we had before COVID to make the workforce much more inclusive and inclusive, that companies are serious about giving opportunity, are becoming a necessity. If you don't create environments that are enriching for people, open to people of different cultural and economic backgrounds, of different origins, even age, you are not going to get the human resources you need. So, despite the damage the pandemic has caused, in some areas it is going to bring about changes for the better.

Sebastián Royo: One of the key elements in the learning process of students is how they learn. This is a generation that learns by doing. It is fundamental that students have the opportunity to do internships. The development of agreements with companies that allow them to do internships is key to both their education and their career prospects. In the case of Spain, one of the great handicaps is the temporary nature of the labour market. With one of the highest rates of temporary employment in the world, how can companies be expected to invest in their workers? This is one of the major blights on the productivity, innovation and competitiveness of Spanish companies.

Mercedes Delgado: It is essential that there is support from the company and the government because workers have little time, they are busy with the day-to-day running of the company. If they are going to dedicate a certain amount of time to training, they need to be able to free part of the time they dedicate to their day-to-day professional activities. It is therefore essential that a company that recognises that it will benefit from having a reskilled worker supports him or her. One way of supporting them may be to pay for executive education. In the demand for executive courses, there is an increasing demand for entrepreneurship skills courses. The executive wants to know how to be able to invest in and manage new companies, how to collaborate new companies. One programme that I have developed, designed and teach is an entrepreneurship lab where the executive collaborates and teams up with startups in the regional ecosystem. There is a lot of learning, collaboration, help and networking. But that requires the support of business and government.

Ángel Cabrera: An interesting example is Starbucks, which reached an agreement with a university in Arizona to offer employees the opportunity to take an online degree at this university free of charge. But, unlike typical training, where the company pays for the learning it is interested in, in this case it pays for the career that the employee wants, even if it does not help them in any way in their position. It does this as a mechanism to attract and retain talent. With this mechanism, Starbucks guarantees that this person will continue for the next four or five years. This investment in this person's education is going to be positive if the person ends up staying.

Sebastián Royo: For many people, the issue of continuing education comes from the fear of losing their job, but that is completely wrong. The people who are going to be most successful are those who have a passion for learning. What makes people passionate about learning is curiosity, imagination, creativity, ability and willingness to take risks. The problem is that we are not prioritising that in the education system. We have to reverse that tendency to try to get people into institutions to foster those attitudes that are going to foster that passion for learning. We are not doing a good job of that.

Mercedes Delgado: One way to promote creativity, curiosity, passion, is mobility. When you move, go to another region and enter another context, you develop these skills of leadership, creativity, risk-taking. The university has to move young people, let them go to other universities, let them learn from other contexts.

Sebastián Royo: We cannot forget this whole segment of the population that does not have access to training, that feels marginalised and that we are leaving them behind. The issue of inequality is one of the great challenges for the future. We have to do a very deep analysis of what we are going to do with this segment of the population to make sure that they are not only integrated into the labour market and that they have career prospects because they are going to be key to the success of our companies and our economies. The focus on higher education is a bit misguided. It is one of the solutions, but not the only one.

Ángel Cabrera: One of the secrets of the success of the American university, despite problems such as access, is institutional diversity. There are large, elite public research institutions, there are public training universities, there are private universities of all kinds. The rules of the game have been more open, more dynamic, with much more freedom for universities to find their own solutions, which has made them much more competitive, both public and private. In continental Europe, the emphasis has been on the public university, with a lot of rules and hyper-regulation, making it much more difficult to do things differently. Trying to open up the rules of the game, with a much richer panorama of different models, would be beneficial.

Mercedes Delgado: There is no conflict between private and public universities. Both are a fundamental part of regional ecosystems. Each university has its own identity, its own specialisation, because not all of them are good at everything. This provides opportunities to collaborate, because not everything has to be competition. That gives an idea of specialisation, of complementarity.

Sebastián Royo: Wealth comes from diversity. In the United States, the country's success is going to come from institutions that are not paid attention to, which are the community colleges, which are key institutions for providing access to marginalised sectors. They can be the gateway to an education that can open up career prospects, and even be a gateway to four-year universities. Diversity, collaboration and competition will be the three key themes that can determine success.

Ángel Cabrera: In Atlanta, where Georgia Tech is located, there is a very interesting ecosystem. There are two research universities. One is private, Emory University, which is highly specialised in medicine, and Georgia Tech, which is much more specialised in engineering. They collaborate a lot with each other and even have a shared library, even though one is private and the other is public. Another thing they have done is to create a joint department in biomedical engineering, which brings in engineers from Georgia Tech and the clinical and medical side from Emory. This programme right now is ranked number two in the country. But in many other things they compete head-to-head. In the end, the city is enriched because it has different institutions. Two kilometres from Atlanta is Georgia University, which is a huge university, more dedicated to providing access to people. That combination of universities is what makes Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc. want to come to Atlanta. That's the magic of the combination of different entities.

Mercedes Delgado: In the case of Spain, the population is ageing, which means that the young population is smaller. There is an opportunity to educate them well because more resources can be allocated. This will have a long-term effect. This is not something against families, but as a reality that is happening. This is the generation that will face new problems, such as climate change or new technologies. Dedicating resources to this generation can have a very positive impact in the long term.

Adrian Cabrera: Companies don't care if the talent comes from Georgian families, if it's a Spaniard who came to do a PhD, or if it's a Lebanese. The reason Microsoft invests in Atlanta is because it believes there is a talent pool there. The key is how you create a high concentration of talent in one city. How you do that is a political, moral issue. If the birth rate is strong, if there is a good education system and you get that talent, then congratulations. If not, you can start opening the doors to immigration, or seek to offer more education to those who are not getting it right now, or re-educate those who have become obsolete. There are many paths, but the goal is one: if you don't have a high concentration of talent, forget about competing in the global economy.

Sebastián Royo: I totally agree. The other aspect that we are not paying enough attention to is that there are opportunities afterwards, because what we are finding in our societies is students graduating from universities and then finding jobs for which they are overqualified. We need to generate jobs for the talent that we are generating. In Spain, the problem is often not a lack of qualifications, but a lack of jobs for those qualifications.

Ángel Cabrera: Who generates these opportunities? How do you get a company to open its next research centre in Madrid, Barcelona or Valencia, rather than in Zurich? The company is only going to do it if it is convinced that it will find more talent in Valencia than in Zurich. How are you going to create a high-growth company, which, by definition, has to be an innovation company, if you don't have the talent to make the leap and create the new technology? There have to be environmental factors that favour this, but if there is no talent, forget it.

Recommendation to government: more investment, less regulation.

Sebastián Royo: Finding a better balance between access and quality. The issue of investment is key, but, above all, well thought-out investment. In Spain it is not a problem of not spending enough, but of not achieving the right results with the investments we make in education. The labour market is a key structural issue in order to provide an outlet for the people it uses.

Mercedes Delgado: I would add more investment, but also more utilisation of the human capital we are building, and an inclusive utilisation where all demographic groups, regardless of age, gender and so on, have these opportunities if they have the talent.

Dialogue summary How to achieve excellence in the Spanish higher education system? in which participated Luis Garicano, Samuel Martín-Barbero and Patricia Gabaldón (moderator).

On 25 November 2021, the Rafael del Pino Foundation organised the dialogue "How to achieve excellence in the Spanish higher education system", with the participation of Luis Garicano, MEP, Vice-President of Renew Europe and member of the Miras-Portugal Commission of Experts for the Reform of the University System, and Samuel Martín-Barbero, Presidential Distinguished Fellow at the University of Miami.

Luis Garicano: Excellence in universities has two main aspects: excellence in teaching and excellence in research. Excellence in teaching means that students are well trained for their future, both in their professional life and for other aspects of their lives. The first prerequisite for this is the university: students are trained and get a good job. The second element is excellence in research, which is very easy to measure. You measure the impact of research by the citations of academic papers, how many people use that research to build and how many patents, how much impact on companies that research can have. In Spain, employability is not considered at all in teaching and in research we tend to measure the number of articles rather than their impact. In the end, in academia, in research, very few things have much impact and that is very important. Let us remember a very simple measure of excellence: Nobel prizes. The last one we received in Spain in science, to a researcher based in Spain, because Severo Ochoa was not, was more than a hundred years ago. This shows that excellence in our research is far from being achieved.

Samuel Martín-Barbero: Excellence is the last step in a natural cycle of many of the university systems present in the world today. We started fifty years ago when the concern was access. Then it was universality and then quality. Now we are in the fourth wave, which is excellence, but I believe it will not be the last. There are two fundamental ones, which I don't know if they are opposed or overlap, but which are an essential part of the future. One is experience and the other is wellbeing, the learning experience and the wellbeing of the individual. If there is one thing that we have seen amplified, with COVID, as a core value of the university system, or as a new challenge for it, it has been the concern for the individual, for the well-being of both teachers and students. In institutional terms, excellence is about being the best version of oneself and not the false copy of someone else. Excellence as a goal, as an aspiration, is within everyone's reach, but not everyone can reach it with the same means, the same resources and at the same time.

Excellence becomes difficult to digest if there is no quality, impactful research. But there are two other dimensions in which universities can also achieve excellence that are fundamental. One would be the updating of curricula in line with modern times and in all disciplines, not just those most in demand at the moment. There is much room for improvement, updating and refining the curricula. On the other hand, the pedagogical revolution or active learning experience and how to exploit that in the classroom and outside the classroom. As a third element, professional management. Universities also need leadership and management styles that are on a par with other sectors of activity.

Luis Garicano: Institutional change has to do with three things. Firstly, it has to do with governance. Universities have to respond to the needs of society, the rector has to be able to be elected as in other countries and respond to something external, not to the interests of the professors and staff of the university, because then he or she is captured and does not respond to the interests of society but to those of the group that, at that moment, he or she is serving. Secondly, there is funding. Money cannot go to everyone, but according to the results of individual and group research and teaching. One who graduates a hundred students and ninety go on the dole cannot have the same funding as one who graduates a hundred and all one hundred have jobs. In fact, funding should be directly linked to employability. Thirdly, the teaching career must be changed. Now there is a lot of inbreeding, teachers respond very much to the incentives of helping their own and the whole system is aimed at preserving this group of friends rather than competing to get the best. These changes are not very complicated from an implementation point of view. They are changes that are levers of the incentive systems of all the actors. If you give classes that make people unemployed, we're not going to pay you anything. Then people will start thinking about the employability of students. If you tell them that research that has no economic value or impact is not going to have an incentive, then those changes radically change the careers, the effort. That's where we should be going and that's where successful systems are going.

Samuel Martín-Barbero: Governance seen as a responsibility not only inwards, but also outwards, is something that not only in the United States, but also in many European countries, is a minimum, not a maximum. Recruitment processes for rectors internationally, not only in the United States, but also in Canada, Australia, Singapore and in some European universities, go through recruitment systems similar to those for senior management. The credentials of future rectors have to be there. They are academic credentials for all valid when it comes to applying for those positions. But then there are the processes of measuring the capacity of these people to bring about change within the organisation. Their ability to transform the organisation, to lead teams, is important. These are systems where this is commonplace and is compensated and rewarded. It would not be unusual for Spain to do this because other countries in the region do it. This should change the compensation policy and the contractual policy, with more flexible models for hiring, even for management and organisational positions, and not necessarily by competition. Competition is always favourable, whether private or public, because we have to think that, in some parts of the world, the universities that are competing with private universities are public. You take a region like the Persian Gulf, which has been growing around the international campuses of many American and British universities and now, in recent years, the effort of those governments is to create public universities that are as competitive or more competitive than the international universities there. International campus operations in some Southeast Asian countries are being scaled back or closed, as they are finding themselves unable to compete with the national public leaders that have been created in the last eight or ten years. In Spain, competition would give us a better stratification of agents, it would be clearer what an academy is, what a certifier is, what a provider of educational services is, what a research university is, what a college is. All of this would clarify the panorama a little more, but there would have to be changes from the regulatory point of view and from the point of view of a law that would allow this market to open up and be exciting for those who work in it and interesting for those who decide to play in it.

Luis Garicano: There must be researchers and teachers. In the concept of college in the United States, there is a lot of emphasis on teaching, they are very focused on the student. They may not be able to revolutionise their field of research, but they provide excellent teaching. At another level, there are community colleges, which offer two-year degrees and are completely focused on teaching. But I don't think it's a good thing that all institutions aspire to publish thousands of articles in Nature or Science. That is absurd. What they shouldn't do either is to publish bad publications, because that's not good for anything. In the Netherlands there are different contracts, they call them 50%, 60%, 80% research contracts, there are people who are doing research and do very little teaching. If a person is doing first-rate research, he or she wins that contract. If you are gradually doing less research, because you are getting older, then you are giving more classes. There will be centres that have many professors with 80% of research and others that have very few. That's fine. The important thing is that everyone has an appropriate contract for what they are doing. What we have now is coffee for everyone, which means that you have a very good academic at a university who has the same teaching load and the same research load as a man in another department who has not published anything. It is good that there is this distinction and the important thing is that everyone has an incentive to be good at something.

Samuel Martín-Barbero: Regarding funding, there are countries in Central Europe where public universities are also governed by the inertia of seeking private funds, which cover operating costs, or fixed costs, of observatories or chairs, which represent 20% or 25% of the total annual income of these universities. In the US, this is a headache for many university presidents. Seeking private money now becomes a sine qua non on the chancellors' roadmap. Anything that brings investment, donations, well-intentioned and well-sourced from public institutions should be a source of pride for the university system. Israel is also a very interesting country when it comes to establishing career plans for its staff. That could be a source of inspiration for some universities because there is also an opportunity to be happy being a great professor, not a cutting-edge researcher. But a great teacher must also go through a series of demands, such as being an excellent teacher and an excellent student, because it is not just a question of pouring in what you know, but also of learning what you don't know. This is very much in line with a situation that has been in the news in Spain for some months now, which is the role of associate professors, that capital asset of many universities and that weight of responsibility that resides on people who are not in the organisation, who are paid little and who need to juggle in order to make up a normal salary. This is not good for these people, for the system and for the institutions, and it is illogical when many of them are referred to by students as very good teachers.

Luis Garicano: As for how much the system would change if wages could be made more flexible, the change would be radical. We are people who respond to the incentives offered to us. The system is in the hands of associate professors, who do not have permanent contracts, partly because others do not do what they have to do. The six-year term is an element of flexibility that gives a little bit of incentive to help to ensure that there is a certain margin between those who work the most and those who work the least. But you have to link the results in teaching and research to the salary that each professor receives. It is easy to do it upwards, to give supplements. There is a Catalan idea, from ICREA, which has worked very well. It is about special contracts for different people. There is a possibility of saying let's split the research money, or let's allow people to give teaching linked to quality requirements. All that changes radically, because what is very hard is that the person who is giving his all is worse off than the person who is not doing it because he has been a civil servant for twenty years.

Samuel Martín-Barbero: The concept of internationalisation, like that of globalisation, comes to the university system after having been a theoretical concept and a reality within the economic literature. What is done is an interpretation of how a transaction of goods can be derived to the educational context. The great sadness is that we have not been able to advance in the conception of the international within the university sector, since it has been enough to exchange students within the same context, to study the same things and to validate them for the same number of credits. University internationalisation in the 21st century means leaving one's comfort zone, studying something that has nothing to do with what one has been studying, facing a life experience that helps one to break down prejudices, stereotypes and biases, and returning to one's place of origin with the satisfaction of having become a better person, a better being from an intellectual point of view and better educated from an academic point of view. If this also includes a work experience, not just a study experience, even better. It is not that complicated. The university is universal by definition and academic communities are the best for collaboration between living beings and it makes no difference when one professor talks to another professor in different latitudes. There is a lot of room for development for that. We do ourselves a disservice as a country when we boast about the high numbers of students coming to Spain when those high numbers of students do not necessarily follow a full programme in Spain. It is one thing to come to Spain for the magnetism of our country and another to complete an undergraduate or postgraduate degree. Italy and Spain have certain parallels in this sense, we are the world's leading importers of international students, but what really matters is that these students stay with us until they complete their university degrees, something we have not yet achieved.

Luis Garicano: For internationalisation, from the perspective of a university degree, you have to do a series of pirouettes with the Aneca and the accreditations, the reports, the papers, the courses. Abroad, when the course is over, Spanish professors are left in the queue for you to issue their certificates because the rest of the people don't give a damn. If any of us get an offer from an American university or a Dutch university, it's made on the basis of our CVs, which can be looked up on Google Scholar in five minutes. You don't need all those papers, which keep the system as a closed universe. Private universities are much more internationalised because they have a different system for hiring and looking for people that has nothing to do with that paperwork. The OECD is bringing out a report in which one of the things it says is that a very serious problem in Spain when it comes to university-business collaboration, when it comes to achieving impact, is the enormous amount of administrative paperwork, which means that everything has to be justified and checked. It is a paperwork that goes to formalism, but it is not seen whether things have an impact or not. This replaces the objective judgement of the work with paperwork. What the OECD says in this report is that this formalism leads to these results. This also detracts a lot from the presence of foreigners in Spanish universities, because they don't have all these things.

Samuel Martín-Barbero: Regarding COVID, all the rudeness or difficulty of generating an appetite for digital, for new educational technologies in universities evaporated quickly. We had no choice but to accommodate ourselves to a new reality, which was very good from the point of view of the internal climate. Some universities managed to make a large investment in resources, an investment in hardware and software that will stay, which is important, because that robustness of the infrastructure system is there to stay. In terms of the teacher's ability to get the most out of that experience, universities made a major effort to train and to help the teacher to at least get by. Over time, some of these contingency plans have developed into continuing education plans for teachers. If this is done as a general policy it is very positive, if ad-hoc training plans are included in the teacher recruitment policy it is also very positive. It will cost more to go back to the past than to stay in the present. The hybrid format and semi-face-to-face modalities are going to become more established within the portfolio of programmes that universities are going to offer and there is going to be more experimentation in this field. There are going to be very interesting projects in the field of virtual reality, augmented reality, also involving engineering and computer science faculties, not necessarily through the subcontracting of suppliers. Universities will see this as an opportunity to generate a better learning experience for the entire university community.

Luis Garicano: Sometimes you have to be forced to take a leap forward. University teaching has not changed much in the last two thousand years. It seems like a good time to rethink many things. The innovation that I liked the most was the flipped classroom. The idea is as follows. You record the lecture part of the class so that the students can watch it before the class and use one hundred percent of the class time to answer questions, do exercises, discuss a case. This is a much better use of class time in an activity that motivates students, encourages them, gives them something to do and think about, rather than passively taking notes. This idea was in the air, but there was no incentive to implement it. This is a model that is here to stay.

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for the comments, opinions or statements made by the people who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their sole responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference, written for the Rafael del Pino Foundation by Professor Emilio González, are the result of the debates held at the meeting held for this purpose at the Foundation and are the responsibility of the authors.

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for any comments, opinions or statements made by third parties. In this respect, the FRP is not obliged to monitor the views expressed by such third parties who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their own responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference, written for the Rafael del Pino Foundation by Professor Emilio J. González, are the result of the discussions that took place during the conference organised for this purpose at the Foundation and are the sole responsibility of its authors.

• Facebook
• X
• LinkedIn