The UAB Virtual Campus: An Essential Platform for a European Higher Education Environment

Introduction

Teaching research, innovation, and technological advances bring about changes and constant needs in the learning process. Society itself raises new training needs that imply new teaching-learning models. These models need to be adapted to the binomial time (synchronous/asynchronous) space (face-to-face/virtual).

The university is currently involved, within Europe, in a process of coordinating higher education (i.e., years of study, kinds of degrees, quality systems, more widely consensuated assessment criteria, and so on) alongside the adaptation to the new ECTS European credits, which implies changing from a teacher-centred model (teacher conveys knowledge) to a learner-centred model. In this model, the teacher’s tutorials, interrelation and communication between teacher and student, and between students themselves, have a fundamental role. The university should provide an answer to this challenge.

In this article we will present the UAB virtual campus as a platform that may contribute instruments to provide an answer to this challenge. We will focus especially on how teachers use environments that promote tutorials, communication, and interaction between the teacher and students, and between students themselves, and monitoring of the students’ learning process.