RSSThe Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) continuously gains international recognition. This Saturday, the UOC was awarded for its leadership in technology education with the “Center of Excellence” award by the New Media Consortium (NMC), an international consortium of universities, and museums dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and technology. It is the first time a European institution recieves a Center of Excellence Award.
Both, Llorenç Valverde, Vice Rector for Technology and Eva de Lera, an Educational Technology researcher from the Office of Leraning Technologies, collected the award at a ceremony held at the NMC Summer Conference in Monterey (United States). During the ceremony, the Rector of the UOC, Imma Tubella, also conveyed his gratitude to the NMC through the following video:
This award is considered an important recognition to the latest accomplishments of the university in creating innovative technologies. An example of it, is the project MyUOC, the new virtual campus of the university, which allows both teachers and students to build a virtual environment according to their needs. MyUOC also offers the possibility to customize the learning experience through the homepage of the virtual campus. In addition, ts open source nature allows to integrate modules from other learning platforms, providing flexibility and interoperability.
With this award, the NMC also valued the UOC leadership to promote collective collaboration for the development of open source and innovative educational technology. A sample of it was the Open EdTech 2008 meeting held in Barcelona last November, hosted and organised by UOC, whwre over thirty international experts in education and educational technology were gathered to discuss the challenges of education in the XXI century.
