In recent years, the Venezuelan State has undertaken a set of measures intended to break with the institutional framework existing in the country since 1958, including higher education in this process. Such changes have a political basis in, among others, the theory of endogenous and sustainable development.

This creates for the Venezuelan university the need to review both its concept (community devoted to truth-seeking) as well as the pertinence of its functions (traditionally: teaching, research and extension).

Within the structure of the principles and rights consecrated in the National Constitution, higher education was established as a priority strategic area and the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela (UBV) was created as an educational and social project with the mission to train integral citizens, generate and systematize knowledge in scientific, technological, social, humanistic and artistic fields.
This new university model should be oriented toward improving knowledge that contributes to sustainable and endogenous development. Based on such principles, this university appears to break with the traditional university model existing in Venezuela.
We have identified that the UBV responds to a concept and internal dynamic different from the concept of the traditional university. While the latter responds to a concept of scientific knowledge production that agrees with mainstream scientific standards, the UBV works with un-systematized social knowledge, recovering every day, “conventional wisdom” that is not processed on according to scientific systematization.

An innovative pedagogical practice at the latter model is the community project, which functions as the articulating axis between education and research with an integral vision from, with and for the community; nevertheless, in these projects and the undergraduate training programs, priority is given to satisfying practical problems which are not conducive to clarifying a genuine scientific problem.

The UBV is developing what they call “the university-going-to-the-village model” which implies that higher education is offered in small and distant villages where people would otherwise never have the opportunity to study at a university. This practice improves the development of the country’s marginal areas.

Organization of the curricular structure is similar in the two models, but the difference lies in that the emergent model includes the community project as an integrating axis, and the organization of educational units does not correspond to the logic of disciplines. A differentiating shade is the socio-political content that impregnates the entire educational process at the UBV.

The new pedagogical practice oriented toward the community permits discovery and advance in solving problems that are obstacles to achieving development because they are not recognized by the community. This incorporates new actors different from the professor and the student, such as neighbours, communal leaders, communal councils and other educational and non-educational institutions. Thus, a knowledge dialog is accomplished. This good practice ought to be incorporated by other universities in the South because it materializes the university's approach to reality and obtains recognition for the social actors, bestowing legitimacy on the insttitutions of higher education.