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Held between Oct. 11-13 in Montreal, Canada, the Congress of the Americas on International Education (CAEI) opened the way for the discussion on the role and place of ICT within higher education institutions - a subject that is being worked by RedCLARA during the last years in its TICAL Conference -, by means of a roundtable entitled "The ICT and the Internationalization of the Institutions of Higher Education: opportunities or a latent risk?".

It is a consensus that ICT impacts all areas of the University in a transversal way, but in what way should they be considered in planning and decision making? These and other issues were part of the debate generated at the roundtable, where each speaker shared the particular situation of their institutions and contexts. Former President of the IOHE and current President and Vice Chancellor of Royal Roads University, the canadian Allan Cahoom commented that in his institution ICT plays a central role, since the university offers its courses mainly in the online modality, context in which ICT has vital importance, both in supporting the teaching model and in the use for other aspects related to university management.

According to Antonio Fernández, Deputy Chancellor of the Government and Delegate of the Rector for Interaction with Society and Companies of the University of Almería, in Spain, the University puts ICT in a central place. Fernández also confessed that, in the exercise of his function at the ICT Commission of Crue Universidades Españolas, there is a concern and a central view on the use of ICT, both as support for management, as well as in the fields of education, research and extension. From Argentina, Ernesto Chinkes, Honorary President of TICAL and General Coordinator of Information and Communications Technologies at the University of Buenos Aires, addressed the situation that is evident in Latin America from the experiences presented in TICAL.
After this contextualization, the debate focused on the importance that ICT should have at the level of university government. The roundtable established that, given the challenges that institutions face today, it is no longer possible to think of ICT only as a tool to support or provide services; rather, they must play a strategic role in supporting the strategic planning of universities. In this way, when we talk about student mobility, internationalization of research, management of data generated by the university, new pedagogical models, just to mention some HEI challenges, ICT must be present in planning, decision making and definitions made by each university.

Carmen Gloria Labbé (moderator of the board and representative of RedCLARA) and David Julien (general secretary of OUI), will work on the development of new activities to favor this discussion of great importance within HEIs, taking into account the importance of including ICT in instances and activities of higher education institutions in the world, a possibility that was already being discussed by the TICAL community, which at the 2017 Conference in Costa Rica launched the book "Empowering the University of the XXI Century: ICT Solutions to Think Future University", a contribution from the Latin American experience on the subject.

• For more information on CAIE, please visit: http://www.caie-caei.org/en/
• Download the book "Empowering the University of the XXI Century: ICT Solutions to Think Future University" (in Spanish)