Current events

Students can send questions, reply to them and vote for the best answers. The forum also includes point scoring to reward participation and those users who are most knowledgeable and provide the best-rated answers.

According to Esther Gonzalvo, Director of the UOC Student Services area, one of the aims of Questions and Answers is “to provide students with a forum where they can ask their classmates questions and respond to their doubts, based on the great added value of their own experience”. The new forum is also designed “to promote the most active members of the UOC community,” she said.

Since its launch on 20 December 2011, over 300 questions have been asked and 600 responses received from students. Likewise, over 5,100 users have taken part and the average amount of time spent on the website has been 5 minutes. The most common issues are assessment, enrolment and evaluation of prior studies.

Subscription service

The search engine lets users search for subjects and select one from the tag cloud of the most popular. The forum also has an RSS subscription service to keep people up-to-date with the latest information on the questions raised.

Over the first few months of operations, the forum will be available in beta format.

Multi-channel service

Carles Sigalés, the President’s Delegate for Students, explained that adaptation to new communication tools, dynamics, channels and needs was a priority at the University. Thus, “we are in the midst of improvement, moving from a centralised, one-way and one-channel system that made it hard to offer a personalised service to students towards a multi-channel system that offers a personalised response,” he said.

According to Sigalés, “the number of students and training programmes at the UOC has grown very quickly, which has led to very complex processes when it comes to student services and monitoring of teaching activities, [… thus, the priority is] to make steps to maintain the level of quality in both the teaching activities and administrative services.”

Over 170,000 virtual queries

The Virtual Campus student services handled 178,197 queries, requests and complaints in 2011. Coinciding with the academic calendar, the busiest months were February (22,145), July (26,532) and September (24,297). The most common academic issues were enrolment, admissions and validations, and the most common technological issues were Virtual Campus usernames and passwords. The Twitter channel has handled 2,898 tweets since it began on 2 March 2011 and has 4,298 followers.