Digitization and education | Tarragona newspaper

The digitization accelerated by the pandemic has had a general nature and an unsuspected intensity. A good part of the emergencies generated by the confinement were conveyed by implementing emergency technological solutions. Faced with the challenge, the (over) human, technical and infrastructural effort made it possible to save different situations, at the cost of generating tensions, deepening some social gaps and even manifesting obvious dysfunctions.

Because digitizing does not simply consist in incorporating more or less complex devices and technologies into our operations – be it industrial, productive or commercial – but in transforming it: technology becomes part of all operational decisions of all departments or areas of the company , institution or administration.

The pandemic has also led to the confusion of online teaching as a result of emergency solutions, with online learning offered by universities specialized in this educational model. While face-to-face universities focus mainly on students who access university degrees after high school and selectivity, or master studies such as postgraduate studies, distance universities, currently mostly online, focus on training people throughout life, adapting to his vital and professional moment.
Online learning therefore requires an adaptation of its pedagogical model to these specific needs. Technology makes it possible to ‘break the limitations of time and space’, as the first rector of the UOC, Gabriel Ferraté, pointed out 25 years ago.

In the same way that we need to guarantee the accessibility and neutrality of the net, it is also essential to ensure the quality of online education, as the only way to increase the coverage of Higher Education. The same 2030 Agenda promoted by the United Nations includes this vector as one of its sustainable development goals to facilitate recycling, updating and opening new areas of knowledge and work.

Training centers, and in particular the University, must redefine their role to become more open institutions, more attentive to the economic, social and cultural hunch, more global and with greater impact.

Digitization must be seen as an opportunity in the creation of knowledge societies, in the gestation of a critical and active citizenship, and in the activation of all the productive and investigative potential -significantly the feminine one-. Digitization is an unstoppable reality, let us know how to take advantage of it for individual and collective benefit.

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