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The iUOC project at Learning Without Frontiers (conference and festival)

Tuesday, February 21st, 2012

The UOC’s Innovation Programme and Office of Learning Technologies attended the event as guests of GSMA Mobile Education on behalf of the University and Orange.

The Learning Without Frontieres festival included the GSMA Mobile Education dome, where different institutions and companies could set up stands about mobile education projects. Alongside Orange and the UOC, the other companies with stands were Vodafone India, Castalia (m-learning in Japan, presenting a project in areas affected by the tsunami), Telefónica Learning Services, KDDI (robots for mobile learning) and Qualcomm (mobile education and augmented reality).

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Marta Enrech, Director of the UOC’s Innovation Programme, before the Orange-UOC stand is set up

All the institutions and companies with a stand in the GSMA Mobile Education area gave presentations on their projects over the two days of the event. You can find here a brief summary of the iUOC project presentation: http://icommunity.blogs.uoc.edu/ipad-campus Likewise, the Office of Learning Technologies also took part in one of the panels of experts on mobile education organised in the GSMA Mobile Education area.

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Networking after the iUOC presentation (Eva Patrícia Gil, Community Initiatives Director – Learning Technologies Office)

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Josep Rivera, from the Office of Learning Technologies, takes part in the GSMA Mobile Education Panel

The conference is seen as the most important for technology and education, and the quality of speakers (Noam Chomsky and Ken Robinson, among others) attracts a great number of participants. The GSMA Mobile Education area is very popular. This gave us the chance to meet (as well as the companies and institutions mentioned above) people from Spanish and international universities and academic institutions interested in implementing mobile learning, and other operators embarking on projects in this field – of these, we would highlight Softbank, a Japanese operator working on m-learning projects with distance universities in its area of influence.

Tags: iPad, iUOC
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Enhancing Mobile Learning at UOC: iUOC project at the EUNIS conference

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

In collaboration with the company Orange, the UOC has developed an iPad application that users can download directly from their device for connecting to the UOC’s Virtual Campus in an optimum manner.

Here you have the video of our speech at the EUNIS conference, about mobile learning in the iUOC project.

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iPad Campus Application

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

Dorup E-Learning Award

We presented in Dublin our application for iPad financed by Orange Spain in two conferences on June: the first one was the EUNIS Conference, where we can find people involved in administrations systems of the main universities in Europe. Although is in general terms a very technical conference, we went to present our project into their learning awards.

These awards recognize projects with a big component of learning innovation. Unfortunately, our project was not awarded, but it was one of the three finalists, and we have this title in acknowledgement. Moreover, this is a very interesting place to find other product managers of IT projects of the main European universities.

The second one was the EDEN Conference.

The EDEN conference is the conference of the European Distance and e-learning Network, and it’s an essential event because it’s a meeting point of any researcher interested in elearning. This conference has a very pedagogical perspective, and our presentation was received with very interest and a lot of questions. EDEN is also a very good place to know researchers of the main distances and blended learning universities in Europe. Here you can see the video we presented there:

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CSUN 2011: the 26th Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference

Monday, May 9th, 2011

Last March, we presented at the 26th Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference in San Diego (California) the results of the interviews to students with visual impairments on their difficulties and needs when they study at our e-learning university (see post titled ‘Accessibility and usability for students with visual disabilities’ ).

Here, you can find slides of this presentation:

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View more presentations from Office of Learning Technologies, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

The conference was organized by the Center on Disabilites at California State University, Northridge. (CSUN), and is the largest event and one of the most relevant conferences on accessibility.

Among the more than 350 speaker sessions, topics were related to visual, motor and hearing disabilities, accessibility and learning, and web accessibility and always from the point of view of assistive technology. The presence of big companies, such as Google, IBM, Yahoo, Nokia, Apple, etc was also remarkable. On the other hand, exhibitors with new products and applications could also be found at the conference.

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Tags: Accessibility
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edit@ Day

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

One of the aims of the edit@ project was to promote and disseminate the tools developed so as to prolong their use and applicability.

This final aim, the last part of the project, was addressed with the organisation of edit@ Day.

editaday-community

Following the campaign to publicise the event via social networks, such as Twitter, the much anticipated edit@ Day event took place on 9 March at the UOC’s Wiki Lounge.

It was a great success in terms of attendance, and in terms of the following on Twitter (as mentioned in an earlier post, the conference could be followed via the #editaday hashtag, and these posts were then shown on the screen in the room). There were talks from Eva Gil, UOC Office of Learning Technologies; Juan Miguel Barajas, Ibermática, and Bel Llodrà, IBIT Foundation, who offered an entertaining look at the phases developed as part of the project: output formats, pilot test, the future of edit@, etc.

Their talks included presentations that can found in the “Documentation section” of the website and on SlideShare.

Those attending also saw a fabulous video where the project partners detailed the results of the edit@ project, and one offering a useful demonstration of the edit@ toolbar which helped show its use. Both are also available from this site, in the “Dissemination section“, or on YouTube. Here are links to the demo and the video presenting the results.

Once the talks were over and the videos had been shown, the event moved upstairs in the Wiki Lounge for edit@ Techno where experts offered demonstrations and explanations to answer the doubts arising among those attending.

To end the event, there was time for networking during the edit@ Aperitif, with cava, drinks and canapés – an ideal way to celebrate the culmination of a job well done.

The photographs from the event can be found on Flickr or via the widget on our website’s homepage.

It only remains for us to thank all those who made a project of this size possible; from those with a more visible role leading the project to all those who worked on it behind the scenes – and, obviously, to all those who have believed in the project and helped us publicise it. To all of you: thank you.

Tags: edit@day, edit@project
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eduWAI at the 6th Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning

Monday, December 13th, 2010

This last November, we presented the main results regarding the research on user requirements from the eduwai project at the 6th Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning (PCF6) in Kochi (la India).

In this event, the main international organizations of open learning (specially Asian, African and European organizations) were present. One of the main priorities of PCF6 is the inclusion of people with disabilities in the job market; in this sense, the conclusions from the eduwai project on the design of Virtual Learning Environments for people with visual and intellectual disabilities were received with great interest.

You can find slides of this presentation in this link.

Tags: Accessibility, Eduwai, MyUOC
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USAB 2010: HCI in Work & Learning, Life & Leisure

Friday, November 12th, 2010

On the 4th and 5th of November, we attended the USAB2010 symposium in Klagenfurt, Austria. We presented a long paper titled “Mobile learning and commuting: contextual interview and design of mobile scenarios”. This research is based on contextual inquiries of UOC students whilst commuting (see post titled “m-project: UOC students and mobile learning“). We described the needs and requirements of students who undertake on-line learning and use their commuting time to study or do learning-related task, and also we defined mobile learning scenarios based on these requirements (this link will lead you to the paper; and this link will lead you to the presentation).

The USAB 2010 symposium is organized by the Workgroup Human Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering of the Austrian Computer Society. The symposium focuses on HCI and usability. In this edition, the symposium was titled HCI in work & learning, life & leisure, and the thematic sessions discussed different aspects related to HCI, such as enabling user experience with future interactive learning systems, psychological factors of HCI, e-health, enhancing the quality of life of the elderly and those with special needs, enhanced and new methods in HCI research and multimedia applications.

From an academic point of view, the symposium is of a high prestige due to the fact that the proceedings are published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) Series, assuring the quality of the accepted research in the conference.

Tags: mobile learning
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Mobile HCI 2010

Thursday, October 14th, 2010

On the 8th, 9th and 10th of September, we attended the Mobile HCI 2010 conference in Lisbon, in order to present our poster titled “Mobile Learning Scenarios from a UCD Perspective”, where we showed two scenarios via story boards, based on our ethnographic study of UOC students in a mobile context (see the post titled “m-project: UOC students and mobile learning“).

At the poster session we also presented the UOC Virtual Campus adapted to Ipad and some learning content adapted to mobile phones and e-ink devices.

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Mobile HCI is considered the most important event worldwide in the area of Human Computer Interaction applied to mobiles devices and applications; there, it is possible to find the user experience labs from the major technology companies and mobile operators worldwide. For instance, the presence of US companies at the conference is remarkable like those of Google, Motorola, Vodafone, Nokia, Sharp, etc, even though the conference is always located in Europe.

In general the conference is focused on applied research. In this edition, the presence of researching localization and the enhancing of tactile interfaces were outstanding. Some other research was addressed to mobile accessibility, mobile social media, maps, browsing, interaction and ethnography and contextual inquiries.