The University is a very old institution. The first of them appears in Bologna (Italy) in the last centuries of the Middle Ages. But it is the Sorbonne in Paris, founded in 1150, which achieved independence from the clergy and in 1215 conquered its autonomy.
Universities emerged notoriously during the 18th century, with the Enlightenment, when all disciplines of knowledge developed and scientific knowledge flourished. But a hundred years later, the intellectual task manifests itself in a clear regression with the Positivist vision, and then later Behaviorism during the 20th century.
The last century is marked mainly by the end of the Second World War and the urgent need to train human resources for professional improvement, therefore, the university is overcrowded. But such training could not imply that workers were absent from the companies, so the concept of distance education germinates , which is perfected in this century.
The rise of the online university
The digital university has its direct antecedent in correspondence education, which emerged at the beginning of the last century, but, specifically in Europe, it developed in a remarkable way at the end of the 1960s, when the British Open University was born.
Subsequently, as a result of technological progress and the creation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), the online university is launched , which entails great benefits in terms of costs and therefore facilitates access to careers, postgraduate courses and master's degrees.
The online university maximizes the student's resources and allows them not to have to travel, reside in another city, save time and costs, etc. In addition, it invests in the best professional talent specialized in online training, in order to create specific content for e-learning platforms, as in the case of the Isabel I University.
But it is not about reproducing traditional materials and making them available to students digitally. With the birth of online education, a new branch of didactics appears, digital didactics , which seeks to optimize the teaching-learning process with a different methodology.
Who study at online universities
Every day a greater number of people study careers, postgraduate degrees and online masters, due to the ease that this system represents in terms of managing schedules and the particular rhythm of learning of each person. The model represents, in opposition to behaviorism, the constructivist conception of learning, where individuals are the main actors in their training process.
This option opens the doors of the study to those who work and have to meet a schedule, mothers and fathers who cannot abandon their children, those who are located in geographical areas where there are no universities, older adults who do not dare to join the classrooms, and also those who for some reason have physical mobility problems.
Likewise, it allows that there are no restrictions on the possibility of choosing the preferred study option and the best university. In this regard, one must be very careful in the selection, since each university is characterized by its own pedagogical vision and its particular didactic conceptions, as well as by its teaching level. And the fundamental thing is to acquire a solid formation.
see also finance and business knowledge
