Abstract:
Have you ever felt your teaching and learning experience limited by current online tools and systems you and your students are using? Are you interested in exploring more flexible and customizable experiences in support of making educational technology more personal and less institutional? The Open University of Catalonia (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, UOC), asked these questions and has come up with a novel approach that may provide a vision of the future.
Please join us for a presentation and discussion that will feature MyUOC, the UOC's new open source online learning environment that is designed to provide more options and choices to all; students, faculty, and staff. MyUOC is a flexible, customizable, modular, accessible and interoperable framework allowing users to integrate modules from other learning platforms such as Moodle or SAKAI, as well as other applications such as Google or Facebook. MyUOC tools are designed to operate across the different devices in use today within our educational community beyond just desktop or laptop computers (i.e., mobile phones, ebooks, PDAs, etc.). MyUOC's educationally focused modules can also be deployed out to other, more mainstream environments, like iGoogle.
MyUOC is open source, based in standards and has been designed by multidisciplinary teams using user centered design methodologies. Over the past few years OEIT has collaborated with UOC and has been closely following the development of MyUOC. We are excited to help share this important work with the MIT community.
About the Presenters:
Llorenc Valverde is the Vice-rector of Technology at the Open University of Catalunya (UOC), a fully online university with more than 40.000 students, several undergraduate and graduate degrees and a PhD program on Information and Knowledge Society (IKS). He is also a tenured Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence full professor at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB) since 1989.
Professor Valverde has conducted extensive research in Artificial Intelligence, some of it during his time at the University of California at Berkeley in addition to other universities and research centers. He is a member of the Editorial Committee of several scientific publications. Professor Valverde will be joined by colleagues from the Office of Learning Technologies at UOC:
Xavi Aracil, ComuniLab project director
Eva de Lera, Senior Strategist and The Joy of Learning project director
Francesc Santanach, EdTech: Services and Standards project director
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