The Community Lab is committed to designing and developing applications to create a sense of community around the UOC Learning Environment by:

• Addressing the needs of all types of users, including those who face more barriers and belong to minorities.
• Providing a customized online environment and, hence, increasing the degree of personalization.
• Launching projects that exploit the field of portability and mobile devices so that users can access content everywhere and anywhere.

The mission of the Community Initiatives department is “promoting the campus as a learning community place by providing the tools and applications required to build and integrate social networking within the university”.

In order to achieve this mission, we carry out a large set of projects and tasks which configured the objectives of our department, as you can see at this presentation:

The complete list of objectives of our team is:

• Start a global project on the overall user experience of students, including those with disabilities, which implies specific projects as Contextual Inquiry at the UOC “headquarters”, DCU applied to community and mobile projects, study of the user experience of students with different disabilities…
• Consolidate the campus 5.0 and its basic tools: through the diffusion and dissemination of the look & feel, accessibility guidelines and development of widgets, and projects as new webmail, widgets of external tools, chat, agenda, files area (dropbox), mobile home page, mobile applications such as campus4IPAD and android tablets, mailbox app…
• Consequently with our mission, we also want to introduce social network tools into the Campus 5.0, in line with the action plan 1.4.3. “Promotion of the participation of the strategic plan”, with projects as microblogging, geolocator, my profile 2.0, personal blogs & wikis, social bookmarks, my friends…
• And in order to do that we find new sources of funding; in this way, we have already presented two proposals to the INMPACTO call (languages4all & Wands); we already have a project financed by the plan AVANZA, the eduwai project; we plan to present two proposals at the call of the Seven Framework Programm of the European Union (one about knowledge management and mobile technology and another one about augmented reality, which we presented too to the call Recercaixa); we have a cooperation project financed by the ACUP(Agència de Cooperació de les Universitats Públicas), the Technipedia project; and we have also two innovation projects of the UOC (one about augmented reallity and another one about contents4iPad), we have the Campus iPad financed by Orange Spain and we plan to present proposals to another calls, as for example the call UNIDISCAT, referring to the area of accessibility.

The people who are behind these goals and make them possible are:

• Development: Jose Cano, Jose Mora, Llorenç Sabaté, Luis Villarejo
• Design: Irene Manresa, Arantxa Hernández
• User experience: Pablo Rebaque, Irene Manresa, Eva Patrícia Gil
• Accessibility: Llorenç Sabaté
• Coordination: Eva Patrícia Gil