Delimitaciones previas a la formación para el uso de las TIC en la enseñanza universitaria: funciones y competencias del docente en entornos virtuales

En esta comunicación se esclarecen funciones, roles, competencias y tareas del docente universitario en entornos virtuales de enseñanza y aprendizaje con el propósito de contribuir a mejorar el diseño de acciones formativas dirigidas a la capacitación del profesorado para este ejercicio Este resultado se obtiene del análisis de significativas referencias que tratan el tema y de la valoración del diseño de acciones formativas realizadas en universidades europeas que participan activamente de este propósito. El estudio constituye una acción del proyecto Elene-TT - elearning network for Teacher Training.

Promoting the Creation, Share and Use of OERs through Open Repositories and Social Networks

In this paper we discuss and analyze the process of using a learning object repository and building a social network on the top of it, including aspects related to open source technologies, promoting the use of the repository by means of social networks and helping learners to develop their own learning paths.

Redefining dropping out in online higher education: a case study from the UOC

In recent years, studies into the reasons for dropping out of higher education (including online education) have been undertaken with greater regularity, parallel to the rise in the relative weight of this type of education, compared with brick-and-mortar education. However, the work invested in characterising the students who drop out of education, compared with those who do not, appears not to have had the same relevance as that invested in the analysis of the causes. The definition of dropping out is very sensitive to the context. In this article, we reach a purely empirical definition of student dropping out, based on the probability of not continuing a specific academic programme following several consecutive semesters of "theoretical break". Dropping out should be properly defined before analysing its causes, as well as comparing the drop-out rates between the different online programmes, or between online and on-campus ones. Our results show that there are significant differences among programmes, depending on their theoretical extension, but not their domain of knowledge.

From institutional repositories to personal collections of learning resources

Institutional digital repositories are a basic piece to provide preservation and reutilization of learning resources. However, their creation and maintenance is usually performed following a top-down approach, causing limitations in the search and reutilization of learning resources. In order to avoid this problem we propose to use web 2.0 functionalities. In this paper we present how tagging can be used to enhance the search and reusability functionalities of institutional learning repositories as well as promoting their usage. The paper also describes the evaluation process that was performed in a pilot experience involving open educational resources.

Open Educational Resources: an opportunity for virtual learning institutions

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC, Open University of Catalonia) is involved inseveral research projects and educational activities related to the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). Some of the discussed issues in the concept of OER are research issues which are being tackled in two EC projects (OLCOS and SELF). Besides the research part, the UOC aims at developing a virtual centre for analysing and promoting the concept of OERin Europe in the sector of Higher and Further Education. The objectives are to makeinformation and learning services available to provide university management staff,eLearning support centres, faculty and learners with practical information required to create, share and re-use such interoperable digital content, tools and licensing schemes. In the realisation of these objectives, the main activities are the following: to provide organisationaland individual e-learning end-users with orientation; to develop perspectives and useful recommendations in the form of a medium-term Roadmap 2010 for OER in Higher and Further Education in Europe; to offer practical information and support services about how to create, share and re-use open educational content by means of tutorials, guidelines, best practices, and specimen of exemplary open e-learning content; to establish a larger group ofcommitted experts throughout Europe and other continents who not only share theirexpertise but also steer networking, workshops, and clustering efforts; and to foster and support a community of practice in open e-learning content know-how and experiences.

La coordinación de la actividad de tutoría en las universidades virtuales. El caso de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

El esfuerzo por desarrollar metodologías de enseñanza-aprendizaje específicas para el entorno virtual no ha venido acompañado de un impulso similar para adaptar los mecanismos de coordinación del profesorado, en general, y la actividad de tutoría en particular, a las características de las universidades virtuales. Esta comunicación contribuye a elaborar modelos organizativos que faciliten un buen desarrollo de la acción tutorial en línea. Con este fin, se presentan los principales elementos para estructurar y coordinar la acción tutorial, y se explica el modelo concreto adoptado en la UOC. Finalmente se presenta una valoración de la experiencia que puede ser útil para otras instituciones.

OpenApp: experiencias y herramientas docentes y de gestión en abierto

La Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) es una universidad en línea que realiza un uso intensivo de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación para proporcionar una educación y aprendizaje a lo largo de la vida. Des de sus inicios la universidad ha desarrollado y testeado metodologías y tecnologías con el objetivo de proporcionar soluciones a los retos de aprendizaje y docentes ofrecidos por la comunidad de estudiantes, académicos y personal de gestión.Fundamentado en este saber hacer, nace la plataforma OpenApps con la finalidad principal de poner a disposición de la comunidad la experiencia acumulada en la UOC durante más de 15 años en docencia, aprendizaje y gestión para que pueda ser aplicado, adaptado o evolucionado por terceros. En este artículo se presentan las características esenciales para que una innovación pueda formar parte de esta plataforma institucional, las especificaciones y usuarios de la plataforma, la finalidad del servicio y las futuras líneas de trabajo.

Open Apps: Opening Teaching Experiences and Applications

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) is an online university that makes extensive use of information and communication technologies to provide education. Ever since its establishment in 1995, the UOC has developed and tested methodologies and technological support services to meet the educational challenges posed by its student community and its teaching and management staff. The know-how it has acquired in doing so is the basis on which it has created the Open Apps platform, which is designed to provide access to open source technical applications, information on successful learning and teaching experiences, resources and other solutions, all in a single environment. Open Apps is an open, online catalogue, the content of which is available to all students for learning purposes, all IT professionals for downloading and all teachers for reusing.To contribute to the transfer of knowledge, experience and technology, each of the platform¿s apps comes with full documentation, plus information on cases in which it has been used and related tools. It is hoped that such transfer will lead to the growth of an external partner network, and that this, in turn, will result in improvements to the applications and teaching/learning practices, and in greater scope for collaboration.Open Apps is a strategic project that has arisen from the UOC's commitment to the open access movement and to giving knowledge and technology back to society, as well as its firm belief that sustainability depends on communities of interest.

Engaging students in an e-learning experience : how to manage information resources through wikis and web blogs

The purpose of this paper is to describe the collaboration between librarians and scholars, from a virtual university, in order to facilitate collaborative learning on how to manage information resources. The personal information behaviour of e-learning students when managing information resources for academic, professional and daily life purposes was studied from 24 semi-structured face-to-face interviews. The results of the content analysis of the interview' transcriptions, highlighted that in the workplace and daily life contexts, competent information behaviour is always linked to a proactive attitude, that is to say, that participants seek for information without some extrinsic reward or avoiding punishment. In the academic context, it was observed a low level of information literacy and it seems to be related with a prevalent uninvolved attitude.

Analyzing hidden semantics in social bookmarking of open educational resources

Web 2.0 services such as social bookmarking allow users to manage and share the links they find interesting, adding their own tags for describingthem. This is especially interesting in the field of open educational resources, asdelicious is a simple way to bridge the institutional point of view (i.e. learningobject repositories) with the individual one (i.e. personal collections), thuspromoting the discovering and sharing of such resources by other users. In this paper we propose a methodology for analyzing such tags in order to discover hidden semantics (i.e. taxonomies and vocabularies) that can be used toimprove descriptions of learning objects and make learning object repositories more visible and discoverable. We propose the use of a simple statistical analysis tool such as principal component analysis to discover which tags createclusters that can be semantically interpreted. We will compare the obtained results with a collection of resources related to open educational resources, in order to better understand the real needs of people searching for open educational resources.

Proceedings of the 1st Seminar on Higher Education Rankings and E-learning

First International Seminar on Higher EducationRankings and e-Learning. Proceedings

Jóvenes y prácticas comunicativas: más allá de los datos estadísticos

La forma en que adolescentes y jóvenes utilizan las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación es diferente a la de la población adulta. Las prácticas son más intensivas y extensivas entre l@s más jóvenes, tal y como muestran las estadísticas disponibles. Este resultado, ampliamente conocido, nos lleva a preguntarnos ¿qué implicaciones tienen estas prácticas comunicativas de las generaciones más jóvenes?Tomando como punto de partida algunos estudios que analizan la situación, tanto en España como en otros países, revisaremos los cambios que ya se están produciendo en ámbitos que van desde el aprendizaje a la socialización. Revisaremos, asimismo, algunas propuestas que intentan dar una explicación teórica global de las prácticas y las actitudes comunicativas de jóvenes y adolescentes. En el análisis tendremos en cuenta el creciente proceso de individualización de nuestras sociedades y la presencia habitual de comunidades de práctica permanentemente conectadas que caracterizan a estas generaciones.

An Empirical Study on Faculty Perceptions and Teaching Practices of Wikipedia

Some faculty members from different universities around the world have begun to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool in recent years. These experiences show, in most cases, very satisfactory results and a substantial improvement in various basic skills, as well as a positive influence on the students' motivation. Nevertheless and despite the growing importance of e-learning methodologies based on the use of the Internet for higher education, the use of Wikipedia as a teaching resource remains scarce among university faculty.Our investigation tries to identify which are the main factors that determine acceptance or resistance to that use. We approach the decision to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool by analyzing both the individual attributes of faculty members and the characteristics of the environment where they develop their teaching activity. From a specific survey sent to all faculty of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), pioneer and leader in online education in Spain, we have tried to infer the influence of these internal and external elements. The questionnaire was designed to measure different constructs: perceived quality of Wikipedia, teaching practices involving Wikipedia, use experience, perceived usefulness and use of 2.0 tools. Control items were also included for gathering information on gender, age, teaching experience, academic rank, and area of expertise.Our results reveal that academic rank, teaching experience, age or gender, are not decisive factors in explaining the educational use of Wikipedia. Instead, the decision to use it is closely linked to the perception of Wikipedia's quality, the use of other collaborative learning tools, an active attitude towards web 2.0 applications, and connections with the professional non-academic world. Situational context is also very important, since the use is higher when faculty members have got reference models in their close environment and when they perceive it is positively valued by their colleagues. As far as these attitudes, practices and cultural norms diverge in different scientific disciplines, we have also detected clear differences in the use of Wikipedia among areas of academic expertise. As a consequence, a greater application of Wikipedia both as a teaching resource and as a driver for teaching innovation would require much more active institutional policies and some changes in the dominant academic culture among faculty members.