PROSPECTIVE FOR UNIVERSITIES OF THE FUTURE FROM POST-PANDEMIC LEGACIES

Abstract

The 2020/2021 pandemic confronted us with a difficult context, riddled with contradictions. Inequality in access to formal education was a tangible fact in numerous sectors of the population throughout the world, especially in countries with the greatest difficulties in their development. But the pandemic also inaugurated new ways of learning and teaching for many students and teachers, and in the case of higher education, it forcefully reinstated the founding principles of distance learning, providing opportunities for busy adults who could not access the studies in institutions with face-to-face modality. Convened by the Secretariat of University Policies, the National University of Patagonia San Juan Bosco -UNPSJB- together with eight other universities carried out a study about the actions developed from the emergency situation generated by pandemic, which forced the university system to adapt the pedagogical, scientific and social continuity of its academic offer, its research, its relationship with society and its forms of institutional management. The working group was made up of representatives of all faculties, coordinated by the Permanent Institutional Evaluation Program. In this work, several of the opinions and experiences shared by professors, students and researchers of the UNPSJB during the pandemic stage are recovered, in order to recognize and understand the educational processes that have arisen in an institution that, from the emergence of these phenomena, has changed in some of its practices and will surely continue to transform.