Human Capital in Online Higher Education Settings: A Socio-Educative Perspective Applied to Graduates of an Online University

Abstract

In recent decades, a series of changes has shaped a model for universities backing new ways of understanding education and educational institutions in our societies. The appearance of completely online universities and traditional university departments offering online programmes, openly and en masse, bear witness to this. All these changes are an opportunity to rethink the role and function of universities in our increasingly interconnected and global societies. In what follows, we propose our contribution to this debate by focusing on the specific case of the “Universitat Oberta de Catalunya” (UOC), an online university of the Spanish educational system.