UOC shares its experiences in educational innovation in latest EADTU report
Subject: Multidisciplinary20/06/19"The Envisioning Report for Empowering Universities" includes an article by Gema Santos and another by Marcelo Maina, Lourdes Guàrdia and Sandrine Albert.
The European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) produces the yearly report "The Envisioning Report for Empowering Universities" as part of the project EMPOWER. Its aim is to create a space where European universities can share innovative and inspiring experiences about the latest trends and developments in online teaching.
Four experts from the UOC have participated in the third edition of the EMPOWER-EADTU report: Marcelo Maina, Lourdes Guàrdia and Sandrine Albert, from the UOC’s Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, and the UOC Library's Gema Santos-Hermosa.
You can find the two articles from the report in the UOC’s institutional repository, O2:
«Good practices in European Short Learning Programmes (E-SLP)», by Marcelo Maina, Lourdes Guàrdia and Sandrine Albert
«Open learning activities in Spanish institutional repositories», by Gema Santos-Hermosa
The state of short learning programmes (E-SLP)
The article's authors explain the main conclusions of their qualitative study, carried out in 2018, of short learning programmes in universities that are members of the project "European Short Learning Programmes" (E-SLP), headed up by the EADTU.
The study produced a list of good practices to bear in mind when designing short learning programmes (E-SLP). These courses are shorter and more flexible than traditional courses and respond to society's current needs.
Open access learning resources
Gema Santos-Hermosa from the UOC Library has also contributed to the latest EMPOWER-EADTU report with an article about open educational resources (OER) and how they can be accessed and consulted outside the classroom via universities’ open access repositories.
The author, also coordinator of the EADTU's group of experts dedicated to knowledge resources, takes a look at the current situation regarding OERs both internationally and in Spain. The article focuses particularly on open access learning activities, one of the least frequent types of OER available from Spanish universities’ repositories, while also discussing the new collection of continuous assessment activities available in the UOC’s institutional repository, O2.
In January, the UOC’s institutional repository released a new collection of fifteen continuous assessment activities thanks to a pilot programme being run with the Faculty of Economics and Business. The current number of learning activities represents just 26.4% of the total number of OERs published by universities in Spain.
The UOC and the EADTU
The UOC is an active member of the EADTU, seeing it as a way of not only promoting and bringing prestige to its own educational model on an international scale, but also helping to defend online learning in higher education anywhere in the world. Among various other actions, the University participates in the EADTU's Virtual Mobility Task Force.
Gema Santos-Hermosa is a research support librarian at the UOC, adjunct professor at the UB and coordinator of the EMPOWER Knowledge Resources expert group within the EADTU. She also coordinates the open learning resource activities undertaken by the Repositories Working Group within the REBIUN university network