Driving institutional change: challenge based learning for the University of the 21st Century (in Proceedings of the HEAd' 17. 3rd International Conference on Higher Education Advances)

The main challenge faced by higher education is overcoming the gap between university education and the demands of society and the professional world. This gap cannot be accounted for merely in terms of a shortcoming in the relationship between the competencies of academic programmes and the real training needs of lifelong learners, but also involves the mismatch between the design of training models and students' expectations. The UOC has launched the PLA-Niu project in response to this problem. It aims to transform the subjects in the University's programmes into activities designed strictly based on competencies which are aimed at resolving challenges inspired by the professional sphere; to implement a new means of selecting, designing and managing learning resources based on content curation for learning, organising it into specific aggregators for each activity; and to provide a system that enables the production and organisation of training in an agile, flexible and personalisable manner. In this paper, we set out the experience of applying the PLA-Niu in the University as a whole, and present its characteristics, explain the strategies and measures involved in its implementation, and share the reflections of those involved from a critical perspective. ; El principal desafío que enfrenta la educación superior es superar la brecha entre la educación universitaria y las demandas de la sociedad y el mundo profesional. Esta brecha no puede explicarse simplemente en términos de una deficiencia en la relación entre las competencias de los programas académicos y las necesidades reales de capacitación de los estudiantes de por vida, sino que también implica la falta de correspondencia entre el diseño de los modelos de capacitación y las expectativas de los estudiantes. La UOC ha lanzado el proyecto PLA-Niu en respuesta a este problema. Su objetivo es transformar las asignaturas de los programas de la Universidad en actividades diseñadas estrictamente en función de las competencias que tienen como objetivo resolver ...