Facultad Cero

Facultad Cero

Platform for reflection and action on the future of higher education

In the 2019/20 academic year, the Universities was forced to transform their teaching in a few days into a completely virtual model due to the confinement imposed by COVID-19. This has allowed a multitude of teaching experiences and innovations to emerge in the digital field on an unthinkable scale just a few months ago. The academic year 2020/21, although predictably with fewer restrictions, will, in all probability, maintain a mixed model between virtual and face-to-face teaching, making it inevitable for any University to consider: how do we design the next course?

Based on this question, the Facultad Cero (Zero Faculty) initiative is launched, whose objective is to generate a digital space to share experiences and organize virtual meetings to learn from the hundreds of teaching innovations that have been developed in recent months with the practical purpose of improving the design of the next course. Facultad Cero places university teachers as protagonists in this process in order to collect and exchange experiences, both positive and negative, as well as recommendations and proposals. All of this aims to constitute a shared and dialogical learning process that allows generating knowledge in the most diverse fields of university education: teaching resources, digital platforms and tools, evaluation, management of emotions, organization of activities, etc. With all this, the aim is to help the university community to redesign the different subjects better, as well as to carry out a necessary exercise of reflection on the extraordinary situation that we have experienced.

All the universities that wish to do so are invited to participate in this initiative, as well as all the professors who individually wish to do so. We can also hear the voices of the students. The values on which it is built are: innovation, openness, collaboration, a critical view of reality and a clearly proactive and constructive approach.
The compilation of experiences shared on the platform will be accompanied by a global Meeting with professionals from all the participating universities, as well as Meetings at each University that wishes to organize it internally. Facultad Cero will provide a model for the organization of the same, technical assistance and visibility to extend the results to the rest of the university system.

It is time to build together, in a collective and collaborative process, the university of the next academic year and of the future in these exceptional times.

The origin of Facultad Cero

In 2018 the Facultad Cero platform was created, from the University of Granada, through Medialab UGR and from the Knowmetrics project, in order to rethink the University from an open, global and innovative vocation, starting from the question: “How would you design the University if we started from scratch?” It was a question that, at that time, was based on an intellectual exercise of imagination and that became, in 2020, premonitory, a reality, having to rethink the university from completely new and unexpected conditions. That proposal is now updated around the question of how the next course will be planned, in which face-to-face restrictions will probably be unavoidable.

During 4 months of 2018, the entire university community, students, PAS, PDI and citizens of the University of Granada built and shared different proposals to rethink the University model. In this process, various topics were reflected through thematic laboratories on gender, childhood, teaching, research, management, transparency…

This, although we did not know it yet, was nothing more than a preparation for the great global challenge of 2020.

If you would like to receive more information about this project, subscribe to our newsletter or contact us at medialab@go.ugr.es