The Future of Education

The Smart universities perspective offers a possibility for higher education institutions to take advantage of the convergence of technological means, virtual support and IoT technologies in an innovative, transdisciplinary and environmentally efficient way. It is expected that a future not far away, the universities incorporate into their curricular dynamics the environments of connectivity, artificial intelligence, home automation, bigdata among others and become Smart Universities. To this utopian future of the university as an institution, there are different challenges that do not necessarily have to do with infrastructure or budget factors to guarantee it, one of them is the training of the people who will live and interact in these Smart environments. The risk that runs is that of a high attention and prioritization to the development and implementation of the technological resource and not to the people, in which case, an increase in alienation phenomena or an increasing isolation would end up dehumanizing the learning communities of the environment academic. One of the mechanisms to face this and other challenges of efficiency of Smart environments in the academy is institutional research. The institutional research undertaken as a practical exercise of work and orientation to common objectives facilitates the articulation between substantive functions from an intelligent platform of data management and support processes. It is about generating a Knowledge Management and allowing a dynamic of the administrative, that supports the academy under the environments and dynamics of the current knowledge societies and in this way promote other forms and educational structures for the 21st century. This implies an innovative look and renewal of administrative models that allow the emergence of new perspectives in which universities are understood as knowledge and innovation basins and as knowledge-based organizations. To this end, studies such as those of Volwein (1999) propose and develop the notion of institutional research and describe an ecosystem of relationships between substantive functions and administrative support that, in turn, should be supported by the developments of the Smart bet. This paper wants to show the benefits of articulating institutional research with that of Smart Universities, fostering collaborative work networks to explore this approach and strengthen the field of study.           

Keywords: Institutional research, Smart Universities, Universitology, strategic planning, Use data capacity;