Press room
On Saturday, the UOC received the Center of Excellence Award from the New Media Consortium (NMC) – a consortium of more than 300 learning-focused organisations that promotes the use and development of new learning technologies. The NMC selection committee stated that it wished to recognise “the UOC’s leadership in the fields of learning technology and open educational resources”. It is the first time a European institution has received a Center of Excellence Award.
Llorenç Valverde, UOC Vice President for Technology, and Eva de Lera, from the UOC’s Learning Technologies department, received the award in a ceremony taking place as part of the NMC’s Summer Conference hosted by California State University in Monterrey Bay, USA.
This award is seen as important recognition of the work the University has undertaken in recent times to generate innovative technologies to be applied to teaching. One example is the MyUOC project, the University’s new virtual campus, which lets each user build their own customised work space. Its use of open-source architecture means it can incorporate modules from learning platforms like Moodle or SAKAI and applications such as Google or Facebook. Likewise, it can be accessed from any device with an internet connection: mobile phones, PDAs, e-books, etc. It is based on open-source software and standards.
Another example is ¡ELIGE! [CHOOSE!], a project where the UOC is looking to create mobile, flexible teaching materials that can be adapted to the specific needs of each student at all times. With this technology, the UOC can offer subject materials for studies in three different electronic formats, alongside the versions on paper: e-book, audiobook and videobook.
This award also reflects the NMC’s highlighting the UOC’s leadership in terms of promoting collective collaboration for the development of learning technologies and open courseware. An example of this was the Open EdTech meeting which took place in Barcelona last November, hosted by the UOC. It brought together some thirty international experts in learning technology and education to share best practices in these areas and to debate the challenges to be faced by education in the 21st century.
New Media Consortium
The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an international non-profit consortium of more than 300 learning-focused organisations dedicated to promoting the use and development of new media and learning technologies. Its members include some of the world’s most renowned universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), or Yale and Harvard universities.
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