Federica : a life-style OER web-learning platform

RIED. Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 2019

The need for increased scalability, interoperability and flexibility of educational provision is driving the expansion of digital and open learning in higher education. As this movement spreads across institutions worldwide, distance education universities find themselves in a crisis. Technology-enhanced learning is now mainstream in higher education institutions and most have embraced open educational practices as well due to the great impact of MOOCs. In this new fast-growing, chaotic and unstable context, research-based expertise, a dedicated infrastructure and specially-trained staff may no longer seem required for institutions to provide distance and eLearning. Furthermore, new non-institutional non-formal higher education providers of open online or blended learning courses and programmes are emerging as a result of community or special interest group-led initiatives. Far from the days when they stood alone as unique institutions with the unique mission to provide an innovative kind of education, distance education universities are now competing openly with other conventional universities and other educational players. In a time of continuous reduction of public expenditure in higher education, a debate has emerged on the sustainability ofthese institutions, especially in Europe. In this paper we analyse the new social, economical and technological challenges and opportunities which distance education universities are faced with and discuss the reinterpretation of their typical mission. We also explore existing organisational models and propose a new one based on an open network approach.

Online Information Review, 2010

About the authors *Faraón Llorens is the Vice-Rector of Technology and Educational Innovation at the University of Alicante. He has a PhD in computer engineering from the University of Alicante and is a Professor in its Computing Science and Artificial Intelligence College. His current research focuses on artificial intelligence and the application of digital technologies in the field of education. He forms part of the executive board for information technologies and communications of the Conference of Vice-Chancellors of Spanish Universities and is the coordinator of the IT analysis, planning and governance working group which, amongst other things, produces an annual report on ICTs in the Spanish university system. Faraón Llorens is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: [email protected] Juan José Bayona is the Director of the Secretariat for the University Library at the University of Alicante. He has a PhD in law from the University of Alicante and is a senior lecturer in financial and tax law. His main research interests are international taxation and fiscal procedures. However as the academic head of the Library he has had the chance to present papers to congresses about OpenCourseWare, repositories and open knowledge. Javier Gómez is a library technician in the Vice-Rectorate of Technology and Educational Innovation at the University of Alicante. He has a degree in documentation from Complutense University in Madrid. He is the repository manager of the Institutional Repository of the University of Alicante. His current research focuses on open access, repositories and free software. Francisco José Sanguino has a BA in Spanish language and literature. He is a teacher of Spanish as a second language, and a secondary school teacher. He has received grants for the University of Abstract Purpose -This paper seeks to present the gamble made by the University of Alicante (Spain) on the promotion of open knowledge. Information and communication technologies have became pervasive in our lives and in this changing world education cannot remain anchored in oldfashioned models which ignore the evolution that society is going through. Design/methodology/approach -The educational environment cannot continue to be a fixed, closed and isolated environment where studentsassuming a basically passive rolereceive standardised teaching. It must consequently experience a fast and decisive transformation which allows it, amongst other things, to respond to the new challenge posed by society: the need for all of us to share the knowledge we generate, so that further progress can be made. Findings -The Institutional Repository (RUA) and the OpenCourseWare of the University of Alicante (OCW-UA) were conceived from the very beginning as related projects which could constitute consecutive phases in the open publication of knowledge. In this way we achieved the aim of presenting the promotion of open knowledge not as a series of discrete projects but as a global strategic gamble of the institution. In addition to the most visible educational benefits, this policy has had the virtue of favouring the assumption by the University of its role as an online provider of quality (scientific and teaching) content.

2007

Proceedings of OpenCourseWare Consortium Global Conference 2014: Open Education for a Multicultural World.

The aim of this paper is to describe the experience at UNED Abierta (OER programme in the Spanish National Distance Education University, created in 2012), and to analyse some lessons learned, related specially to the MOOCs phenomenon and their integration within the institution and into UNED's mainstream processes. The first sections provide an overview of the types of OER produced at UNED, followed by a description of those open courses managed by UNED Abierta: OCW, iTunes U and MOOCs. From the perspective of the author, Director of UNED Abierta, the paper presents a reflection on results and lessons learned. Some relevant ones are the need of an institutional discussion about open education in general, quality issues or the importance of follow-up of students' profile and learning processes. A last section focuses on future steps that this educational programme envisages at UNED, going through the integration of OERs, and MOOCs in particular, into the mainstream processes developed in this distance education university.

2019

2012

The term Open Educational Resources (OER), the English equivalent of REA, was coined in 2002 in discussions at the Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware UNESCO. It describes "the provision of educational resources on open license, enabled by information technologies and communication, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users with non-commercial purposes". However, in the decade since its conception, OER / REA has come to signify not only those shared resources on the Web explicitly with the purpose of contributing to the democratization of knowledge, but in reality, a movement that now has the support of institutions, governments and individuals around the world. sharing of open content on the Web in general, partly due to its emphasis on legal sharing and reuse, done under open licenses (eg , Creative Commons) and more recently due to growing concern over the creation of mechanisms for assessing quality. Large projects such as the MIT OpenCourseWare, OpenLearn of the Open University in the UK, and Connexions of the Rice University, came to join a number of initiatives aiming not only the deployment of repositories for sharing on the Web, but also discussion and collaborative creation reuse practices, research methodologies and benchmarks of quality. The movement in its current form is no longer occupied solely by questions relating to the sharing of resources itself, that is how to ensure interoperability between systems and platforms for sharing, how to approach and solve problems relating to copyright and mainly to ensure its sustainability. Such questions remain, of course, crucial, but more broadly an interest in the new features of Open Education has emerged, which has existed for decades, but now appropriates the OER in various contexts, including for informal learning. Institutionally, OER begins to be known as Open Educational Practices (OEP). In June 2012, Community OER and UNESCO celebrated 10 years in the area of Open World Congress of Educational Resources in Paris, where the OER Paris Declaration 2012 was formally adopted. This calls on governments around the world to establish the adoption of open licenses for sharing knowledge produced with public funds. OER constitutes a fascinating area involving activism, the creation and use of vanguard technologies, and public This is an area in its infancy, but given its intrinsic link with ICTs and their potential impact on education, The Project OportUnidad, co-funded by the European Commission and comprising 12 universities (4 in Europe and 8 in Latin America) aims to bring OER to the educational practices of universities in Latin America. Despite celebrating 10 years of OER globally, it is clear that its concepts are still often unknown or misunderstood, process of formal and informal education. Access to information about existing practices is therefore essential because it allows the continued education of these professionals to enable them to make informed decisions about Compendium-Cases from Latin America and Europe in Higher Education Compendium-Cases from Latin America and Europe in Higher Education

ICERI2018 Proceedings, 2018

In recent years, there has been a growing demand for online. University of Porto (U.Porto), established an unit of Educational Technologies 20 years ago and after an accumulated experience in providing an Learning Management Systems (LMS) to support face-to-face teaching and learning (T&L), in 2016, the U.Porto developed AcademiaUP, a portal and a LMS platform for the delivery of elearning and blended learning courses. Based on LMS Moodle, AcademiaUP considers the specificities of deployment and creation of distance education contents and materials, as well as the target audience characteristics. Moodle was chosen because our acquired experience but also for its maturity, for being open source and fully customizable and for a large support community. AcademiaUP, has an extensively customized interface and technical infrastructure. It integrates with external tools, BigBlueButton to better respond to synchronous online communication and Panopto for lecture capture and video production. AcademiaUP uses new plugins and a new theme to improve usability and enable a more suitable navigation for formal and non-formal T&L environmentssequential content delivery and contextual presentation of activities and resources. When designing the new LMS for AcademiaUP we were inspired in Coursera Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) approach for the marketing of the courses and in Open2Study for the delivering of the courses. All changes, however, avoided altering Moodle's core code, allowing for easier upgrades whenever newer Moodle versions are available. For the future, we intend to integrate AcademiaUP with the University information system to improve consistency of courses and users essential to accreditation procedures and quality assurance.

INTED 2013 Proceedings, IATED, pp. 6490-6500. ISBN: 978-84-616-2661-8, 2013

"The topic of the impact of Web 2.0 ecologies on the learning contexts of PhD candidates is of particular interest for innovation in higher education teaching and learning. However, this theme results so far underesearched in literature, in particular in the Italian higher education setting. The present paper reports selected findings from an exploratory study investigating how individual doctoral researchers cope with competing institution-led and self-organized, analogue and digital opportunities for learning. This article is based on preliminary results of an online questionnaire which was delivered between September and October 2012 across three Italian universities. The questionnaire aimed to describe the components (people, resources, tools, people and related interactions) of the emerging learner-centered “ecology of resources” [Luckin, 2010], characterizing individual doctoral students variously dealing with their needs of support and striving to achieve their being ‘independent researcher’. The surveyed Italian doctoral students seem to be usual adopters of social media in their everyday life, but there are also signs that they are currently adopting tools and services available in the open Web to undertake activities usually required in their doctoral programs. The research participants show a pragmatic attitude towards the Web 2.0 services and state to be prompted to use such tools mainly by ‘occasional, practical needs’ related to their research activity. Although very few respondents actually curate an ‘academic’ presence in social media, they generally credit the social Web with a wider, still unexploited potential to improve some research tasks. Finally, it is worth noting that the provision or lack of specific research training on these emergent tools plays a key role in the indicated motivations. This early portrait of the emerging learning ecologies of current doctoral researchers sparks cues for reflecting on the extent to which the design of formation of future scholars should take into account changes occurring in learning spaces, also in the light of new forms of networked scholarship being pioneered in the social Web. "