During November 2009, training will be provided for future teachers of the Free Technology Academy (FTA), a virtual training academy that will provide courses specialized in free software from beginning of January, 2010, onwards.

The FTA is an initiative that started last April with the support of the European Union, and the following institutions are currently collaborating: the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL), the University of Agder (UiA) and the UOC. Its aim consists of creating an advanced virtual campus which offers course modules about free software that can be followed entirely on-line by using open educational resources.  In addition, any student involved in this international educational program will be able to follow course validation procedures at the OUNL and the UOC.

With regard to the FTA, the Office of Learning Technologies has been working on the integration of tools like Mediawiki and wordpress on a Moodle platform via OKI connectors, tools that will allow students to easily create blogs and wikis. Teachers, staff members from UOC and UOC educational materials will also be part of this innovative project which also offers a full master program that can be concluded at one of the universities integrated in the project.

In case you are interested in the FTA, you may want to click the image below for further information:

Since last August, the new virtual campus 5.0 alongside its home page, My UOC, is already available to all users from the UOC.

Inspired by Google Aps, My UOC offers numerous customization and configuration options providing flexibility and versatility to a virtual space that every user can easily transform into his or her personal desktop.

Would you like to learn more about My UOC? In that case, pay attention to the following video:

In the department, we are working to provide more services to suit the emerging technology of mobile generation, today embodied by the iPhone from Apple and soon, by other devices from other brands.

In this regard, we are adapting some features of My UOC, the new on-line virtual campus, to give quick service to those who use an iPhone on an everyday basis .

The services that will be provided are what we name “alerts.” From an iPhone one will be able to check if new mail has arrived to the Inbox, read updated news or receive notifications. This service has been designed in order to give quick and easy access to basic information. In this way, accessibility is highly improved, UOC students being much closer to their studies throughout most of the day.

We are currently working to ensure that, in short, users manage to send short messages through this application.

MyUOC, the new on-line campus of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), was declared as the Best Learning Portal 2009 by the IMS Global  Learning Consortium, a non-profit association that works to improve learning through the use of technology. This would be the second consecutive year that the Office of Learning Technologies recieves one of these prestigious awards.

The award is a significant international recognition to the new virtual environment designed by the Office of Learning Technologies with the aim of providing a more engaging and motivating learning experience to its users.

MyUOC’s main innovation is that it’s a truly interoperable learning platform. MyUOC’s technology allows institutions and users not to be limited to any tool or any concrete learning environment. Moreover, the new on-line campus provides a homepage where users can follow numerous options for customization and configuration. In this way, students, teachers and management staff can build a working space to entirely suit their needs. Its open source nature and technology also permits to take any of MyUOC applications and services out to other learning environments and vice versa. Ultimately, MyUOC also aims to share its new solution with the educational community, to promote and establish the flexibility and interoperability of learning environments and to create an educational community that shares their learning tools.

Xavier Aracil, Comunilab leader, Magí Amirall, director of the Office of Learning Technologies and Francesc Santanach, chief architect of MyUOC, collecting the award at the Learning Impact Conference 2009.

 MyUOC, which is available for internal staff of the UOC since February 3rd, will be open to the rest of the community at the begginig of June.

The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) has been evolving its actual learning environment under the name of MyUOC. MyUOC is a modular open source online campus to help faculty and students design their own learning experience.

One the components of MyUOC is the main page, once shown when the user logs in (some applications call it Dashboard). The goal of this page is to show at a glance what’s happening in the Virtual Campus. MyUOC’s main page does a step forward being itself a widget container.

“Widgets are full-fledged client-side applications that are authored using Web standards” [1]. They can be executed inside a web page, giving specific functionality. The most famous widgets web containers are NetVibes (http://www.netvibes.com) and iGoogle (http://www.google.com/ig). But widgets are not web only, there are widget containers for the desktop, like Yahoo! Widgets (http://widgets.yahoo.com/), Apple Mac OSX Dashboard (http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/), Google Desktop (http://desktop.google.com/) or Windows Vista Gadgets (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/sidebar-gadgets.aspx).

MyUOC’s main page enhances personalization and flexibility. Both students and faculty can organize their main page as they want, adding and removing widgets, dragging them around the page, minimizing them, change the background, etc.

The widgets’ directory is divided into three sections: UOC’s widgets (widgets created by ourselves giving information for the internal tools of the Virtual Campus, such as Calendar or Mailbox, Courses, etc), external widgets (widgets from other container such iGoogle) and subscriptions (a collection of UOC’s news). Furthermore, users can create their own widget giving the HTML code and they can add their own subscription to any RSS feed.

We’re working to make it multimodal. The core of MyUOC’s widget container is RSS (Really Simple Syndication), so we can create different visualizations of the main page specifically for the device we’re on (such iPhone, TV, eBooks, RSS clients).

MyUOC’s main page is available nowadays to UOC’s faculty as an option. It will be released to students this semester. You can find more information at http://macedonia.uoc.es/wordpressmu/edtech/my-uoc/

1: http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/#introduction

The UOC has a relevant role in the OpeniWorld, as one of the organizers. In collaboration with MIT’s Open Knowledge Initiative, the event will focus its attention on resource federation, one of today’s key educational technology challenges.

Dr Llorenç Valverde, Vice-rector of Technology at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) leads several teams in the design and development of e-learning technologies as well as being responsible for setting up the path and leading all technology resources at the University. Furthermore Mr Francesc Santanach, Chief of Transversal Architecture of the UOC will participate in a Showcase demonstration through his paper “The Campus Project: e-learning tools and platforms integration”.

The Campus Project, promoted by the Secretariat for Telecommunications and the Information Society (STSI) of the Regional Government of Catalonia, grew out of the agreement signed by the majority of Catalan universities in order to have an open source virtual campus, which make it possible for them to provide higher education, both online and semi face-to-face. This initiative came out of the university system open to the world, aiming at becoming an international benchmark for e-learning.

Ms. Eva De Lera will attend as a representing of the organizer team.

The url of the event is http://www.openiworld.org/Europe2008.html

Chuck Severance was here, some weeks ago, talking about Campus Project with developer teams involved on the project.

See him talking about the campus project:

Campus Project Overview
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRBJZ1kpYI4

Campus Project Architecture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATwP3V0brfI

Campus Project and IMS TI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt8Rvhlsvew

Dr. Charles R. Severance (http://www.dr-chuck.com) is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan focused on the teaching of the practical application of web technologies. Charles is currently a IMS Global Learning Consortium Developer Network Coordinator. Previously he was the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation and the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project, a leading open source collaborative learning system. Charles is the Author of the book High Performance Computing, Second Edition, published by O’Reilly and Associates. He has also been a leader in standards development, including serving as the vice-chair for the IEEE Posix P1003 standards effort and the editor of the Standards Column in IEEE Computer Magazine from 1995-1999.

Vijay Kumar, Rob Abel and our own Llorenç Valverde will participate at the first European OpeniWorld event. We invite you to join us in Lyon. For more information please visit Openiworld 2008.

We will be in San Francisco from February 25^th through the 27^th participating in the Curriki Advisory Board meeting and Sun’s annually ERC Conference. Please contact Eva de Lera if you plan on being there and would like to set up some time to meet and discuss common interests.

The New Media Consortium and Educause Learning Initiave have published the latest edition of the Horizon Report 2008. UOC has been an active participant in the Advisory Board and is also responsible for its translation to both Spanish and Catalan languages.