Press room

The Learning Impact Awards are in recognition of the learning-support technology with the greatest impact. The jury assesses and rewards services and products that provide an important technological stimulus to education. Thus, they singled out the My Way project for a Gold Award from among some one hundred projects presented. IMS also hands out Platinum, Silver and Bronze awards. These awards are given as part of an annual congress that brings together the sector’s leaders from around the world and where factors to improve quality and access to education are presented and debated.

For Llorenç Valverde, this award represents “international recognition of the work that we are doing and an indication of the fact that we are on the right track”. Likewise, the Vice President stated that “it is a message of reassurance for the UOC community and our students, that they can continue to trust in the work that we do to improve the quality of the learning environment, and an incentive for all those involved in this project”.

The My Way project offers everyone the content format they need at any moment using human-computer interaction techniques, user-centred design methodologies and XML transformations. From a single base document, the system can generate different output formats: voice (materials can be downloaded to an iPod or CD to be listened to), web, paper books, e-books o Daisy (a system used by the blind).

This project underway at the UOC has already transformed over a thousand pieces of material into XML to aid students in their work. This then allows, following user-centred design criteria, for output in a range of formats, such as digital, audio (a pilot project has been started with lecturers and radio broadcasters) or Daisy.

All this offers both economic benefits and increased user satisfaction, including reduced costs and production times, the reuse of content and improved quality of materials or the creation of content that can be accessed at any time and under any circumstances. Each format meets the needs, capacities and preferences of different kinds of users. My Way is based on free software.

This project has been carried out in collaboration with the following companies: Editorial UOC, Eureca Media, GEC, Fundació IBIT, Technosite (ONCE), Tecsidel, Translendium and Xperience Consulting. It was partly funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology’s PROFIT innovation programme.


IMS Global Learning Consortium

IMS is a non-profit association that brings together around a hundred organisations from around the world in order to improve learning through the use of technology. Its members work in all fields of e-learning: hardware and software suppliers, educational institutions, government agencies, publishers, multimedia content providers and other consortia. IMS provides a neutral forum in which members work together to advocate the use of technology to support and transform education and learning.