Press room

The Sixth UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning International Seminar, which has focused this year on Open Social Learning, has highlighted that open learning can act as a driving force for the innovation of the Spanish university system. The seminar, which brought together experts from around the world and which ends today, closes with the idea that it is becoming increasingly more real that social networks have to play a very important role in education in the twenty-first century. However, there are still questions to be resolved, such as what should be the role of universities, and educational institutions in general, in learning that is becoming increasingly more personalised and in constant evolution.

Experts taking part at the get-together held in Barcelona have set out that the knowledge and skills needed to develop as a society cannot be accumulated in specific individuals but in networks of people. The new social networks that are emerging from the so-called Web 2.0 are just an example of this. But what and how we have to learn with these networks still do not have a unanimous answer. We need spaces for thought, such as the seminar proposed, and experiences. We need to put the social networks to the test so as not to lose the opportunity to fill students with enthusiasm for ongoing learning, which combines formal and non-formal education, and which ensures them as the principal agents of the global society in which we are immersed.

Results of the course on Facebook
The people in charge of the UOC “Travel 2.0” pilot course on Facebook have assessed the experience positively. Gemma Aguado, from the eLearn Center and Carles Fernández, from Learning Technologies, presented an initial analysis of the course. From the conclusions, it stands out that the majority of students value both the methodology and the content and the participation that has been generated positively. Consequently, 66% of the participants state that they have learnt from the contributions of their classmates and from participating in the forums and the activities. This way, the course has achieved one of its objectives, which was to motivate the participation of the students so that they were responsible for their own learning. In order to incentivise the students’ motivation and participation, different themed forums were set up and a global activity was proposed which was the central theme of the course: designing a blog.

According to the evaluation surveys that were conducted, the majority of the participants feel that Facebook is a good learning medium as more than 80% considered that the characteristics of this social network favoured motivation to learn and participate in the course. The majority of the participants also believe that the design of Facebook is suitable for running a course and almost 75% changed the view they had of how Facebook could be used. Also noteworthy from the evaluation made by the students in the trial is that most of the 79 participants are willing to continue learning using Facebook. This is an aspect that the lecturer on the course feels is important as one of the objectives was that once the five weeks of the pilot course were over, the course should continue to run. This apart, the project managers noted that the facilitator had had to play more of a leading role than had been expected, so showing that the spontaneous workings of social networks do not guarantee collaborative peer learning. The lack of experience, the expectations of what a course should be, and many other initial issues means that the design of courses based on social networks needs to be improved and we need to look more deeply from the point of view of both the educator and the student into what they allow and how to get the most out of them.

OSL as a tool for promoting innovation
The Panel of Experts in Open Social Learning in Spain has taken an X-ray of the OSL situation leading it to conclude that the Spanish university system is not at all favourable to this open learning practice. According to this reflection document, the use of the internet as a means for teaching and learning is not wide-reaching at all and this has added to the fact that among universities there is mistrust of the network with an emphasis on the dangers rather than the virtues. However, despite this, the analysis document also concludes that OSL may act as a salutary lesson to end the obsolescence experienced by the Spanish university system and become the driving force for innovation. Implementation of OSL in higher education would enable the use of virtual environments, access to the educational potential of contents and would do away with the classical idea of the university as a centre for knowledge capitalisation. To improve teaching and learning and to facilitate penetration of OSL in Spanish higher education, this group of experts recommends a series of changes for universities. These changes would have to embrace technological resources management, teacher training with a transformation of teaching culture and a change to the education model which would allow the optimisation of learning processes and would make students the active subjects of the new teaching model.

Favouring admission to education for the least privileged groups
The UOC UNESCO e-Learning Chair has been working for six years in different subject areas that are linked to one another by the intensive use of technologies in education as a basic tool for integration, equality and professional training. Consequently, the Chair organises activities to foster equal opportunities in the knowledge society (open learning); themed Social Learning activities as an instrument for admission to education for the least privileged groups (developing countries, especially in Africa and women) and activities geared towards university cooperation and the incorporation from the social perspective of e-Learning at university. The International Seminar by the Chair constitutes one of the leading actions undertaken by the UOC UNESCO e-Learning Chair for the dissemination and exchange of knowledge.