So, first place, I want to give you a warm
welcome here at UNED in the name of the Vice
Rectorate of Educational Innovation, where I belong.
And basically in this presentation, I'm going
to introduce some of the projects that we are doing right now in the
Educational Innovation Vice Rectorate.
And in particular, I'm going to explain a
little bit more in detail the innovation hub
that we have started just one year and a half ago.
And well, basically, as you know, UNED is
the largest public university in Spain
and the largest campus in Europe.
I'm sure that Angeles has already given you
a lot of information about the university
with more than 200,000 students, 38
degrees, 79 official master's programs.
And as you know, here at Madrid, we have the
headquarter with the 12 faculties and the
central services, and then we have associated
centers along the country and other countries, international centers.
OK, a little bit an overview of the support
services that we have at UNED for study, for teaching and for research.
We have in first place the Distance Education
Institute, which is an institute devoted to
quality assurance and teacher training.
Also we have UNED Open, which is a
unit devoted to open education at UNED.
We create MOOCs and we also deliver other kind of open materials.
We also have a publishing office, also a unit
devoted to digital contents where there is
a specialized team that help us to create
interactive digital materials, videos and so on.
UNED Media, UNED Media is especially focused on
producing high quality videos, video lecture,
but also documentaries and all kind of multimedia materials.
Then we have for students the Center for Guidance,
Information and Employment and another center
for support for users with disabilities, because
we have a lot of students with disabilities in Spain.
We are the university with more students in
Spain with some kind of disabilities, so
we have a specialized center for that.
Also we have the library and also we are the
university in charge of education in penitentiary centers.
So we also have a specialized unit for that.
And basically my vice-rectorate is in charge
of these four units, the Distance Education
Institute, UNED Open, UNED Publishing and Digital Contents.
These are the four main units in my vice-rectorate.
So a little bit about the educational
model that we follow here at UNED.
Obviously as you know, we are a distance learning university.
This means that we make use a lot of information
and technology, information and communication
technologies to deliver our teaching, but
also we have the study centers where we have
a kind of a blended model learning where students
can also go and have a face-to-face class.
It's not purely online everything, but it's a mixed model.
And at the end we have the students and we
want that the students acquire some learning outcomes.
So in this process we have these digital information
and communication tools from video conferences,
of course, the virtual course, the learning
management system, email and so on.
And then we have the face-to-face part in
the headquarters, in the practice
centers and in the associated centers.
For example, I am from the industrial engineering school.
So students in the first courses have to go
physically to do practices because in
engineering they have to touch things.
In the first courses they go to a practice
center that maybe is near their home, but
maybe in third or fourth grade they have to
come here to the faculty to do the practice.
And so this is sometimes it's a kind of
a it's not so convenient for all of them.
So that's why I'm going to present one of the
projects later related to remote laboratories.
And then in the middle we have the teaching
teams, which are here in the faculties.
We have also tutors.
We call tutors to these teachers that are in the associated centers.
And these tutors in the associated centers
provide a face-to-face class every week, basically
more focused on problem solving and these kind of activities.
And the tutors have to be very coordinated
with the teaching teams here in the faculties.
And the teaching teams design the deductive
materials, design the educational methodology
that are going to be used in each one of the subjects.
And then they also decide what kind of evaluation,
if it's going to be final evaluation, continuous evaluation or a mix.
Usually we have a lot of subjects with a mix of both.
And we have been working this last year in four main lines of work.
The first one is the integration of emerging
technologies in the teaching and learning processes.
In the second line, we worked on the
pedagogical design of virtual courses.
In the third line of work, we worked on tutorial session organization.
And in the fourth line, we worked on development
of guidelines and templates for teaching materials.
I'm going to show a little bit more in detail each one of them.
In the first one, when we started working
in the vice rectorate in 2023, we found that
Tsunami of artificial intelligence was coming to us.
And it was a very big challenge, not only for
us, obviously for all educational institutions,
but for us is very, very important
because we are a distance university.
So we don't have the same implications
than in face to face universities.
So first thing that we did is to create a
strategy of how to integrate AI into
our learning and teaching processes.
And we also put a lot of effort on creating
training for both teachers and students.
So we created several documents for faculties,
for students, and we delivered different kind
of courses and workshops about AI and the
impact of AI in education, about tools, AI
tools that can be used in our teaching.
And last year, we started the EduBot project,
which is a platform that we have
created to create AI tools more easily.
AI tools focus on education, okay, or learning with learning purposes.
So later I can show you some examples.
And also we were working on how to provide
training to the teachers on how to use this
new platform that we have created, this EduBot
platform, because we need some training also in this platform.
And also another line of work was the creation
of the educational innovation hub in 2023.
And this was conceived as a hub where all
the services and experts and units concerning
educational innovation in the university go together.
I'm also going to show you a little bit of this project later.
And the last project in this line of work
is the remote laboratories and simulation software.
As I mentioned, for some students, it's not so
convenient to have to come to the faculties,
to the headquarters to do the practices.
Maybe they live in another country, maybe
they have family, maybe they have a job.
So for them, sometimes it's an inconvenience.
So we created this project where we started
to work on the development of a lot of remote
laboratories in different kind of subjects,
mainly focused on technical subjects, engineering, science.
And we delivered, I think, 20 remote laboratories.
We previously had experience on this topic
in several groups inside the university.
But with this project, we were able to allow
other groups to also have remote laboratories, which is something.
Yeah.
Also, regarding this project, I think tomorrow
we have the visit to my to my lab where I'm
going to show you the remote laboratories that we have created.
OK, so in the second line of work is the pedagogical
design of virtual courses, because we had
a transition between one learning platform that
we have during the last more than a decade.
And then we had a transition to a new learning
platform, which in this case is not Moodle,
is a version, an special version of Moodle that we have right now.
So we have to also provide a lot of
training to both teachers and students.
And also we took advantage of this transition
and we analyzed the student activity in the
virtual courses in the old platform and also
in the new one to try to find some indicators
of student success or student dropout.
So we wanted to to to improve this rate of
dropout to to have less students dropping out or education.
And also we have been working on creating a
specialized versions of the virtual course.
And also we have been working on the digital
repository where we have a repository with
a lot of videos, thousands of videos.
So we have been also working on improving this this repository.
And also we have been creating a list of of
services that the digital content unit provides.
They can help us, they can help all the teachers
to create, for example, immersive experiences,
360 experiences or virtual reality experiences,
interactive materials and many kind of digital learning content.
And one of the projects where we have been
working is on learning analytics to avoid
or to prevent the dropout of students, as I mentioned.
So we created a platform that gathers a lot
of information from the platform and help
the teachers to to provide information to
decide how to act before some of the
students drop out the education process.
And also this platform includes a lot of visualization
with graphs and so on, providing information
useful for the teachers to understand how
the course is going and what actions
they can have to to to prevent dropout.
And regarding the third line of work that we
had regarding tutoring sessions, as I mentioned,
we have a lot of tutors along the country, the
faculty, the teachers here in the headquarters.
So we need to coordinate very well between these these two roles.
So we have also working on a new platform
that is integrated in the in the other one
that help us to coordinate much better with them, with the tutors.
And the fourth line of work is the development of teaching materials.
We have an authoring tool to allow our teachers
to create digital materials in a very easy way.
So this is called Giku.
And this is we have been working on a new
version, an improved version of this authoring
tool that is going to be available soon to all the teachers.
OK, so now I'm going to show you one of the
project, the Educational Innovation Hub, a little bit more in detail.
Basically, as I mentioned, when we started
to work in the vice-rectorate two years ago,
we found this big challenge around artificial intelligence.
So we wanted to include also to create this
AI strategy and to include it in the in the hub of innovation.
So in this hub, what we wanted to do is to to
integrate or to put together all the units,
services, resources, experts and new technologies
that were already existing in the university.
But we wanted to put it together in the same place in the in the hub.
And also we created a virtual assistant that
help you understand for your particular project,
for your particular needs in your subject,
what are the services or the units that can
help you specifically to you in this in this in this process.
So this is how the website looks.
Sorry, it's in Spanish, most of it because
it's only for internal use or for teachers.
But basically, we have what we call connectors.
It's one of the connectors, it's one of these
branches in the hub that give you information
about something useful in the university for for your teaching.
And in this connector, we have on one
hand resources to design your project.
Also the units that can help you to to to foster the innovation.
And also we have other resources also useful.
And inside this hub, we created a special
a special connector that is called the lab
for emerging technologies where we experiment
with new learning technologies and how useful
or how useful they are to to improve our learning and teaching processes.
And inside of this lab is where we are integrating
a lot of artificial intelligent tools that
I'm going to show you later to help in this process.
Other connector, a very interesting connector that we have is experts.
Expert is a connector where anyone in the
university can sign up as an expert on some
topic and they say, OK, I'm going to I am an expert on data analysis.
I am an expert on video production.
I am an expert on software design.
And other colleagues in the university can check up.
OK, for my project, maybe it's useful to have
someone with expertise on web design so I
can find someone that can help him help me
in the project, because, yeah, at the end
we are in our office, in our faculty, so we
don't know each other in other faculties.
So I think this is a good way to to know each other.
And also another connector, an interesting
connector is inspiring ideas is a kind of
best practices that that we collect from the university and outside.
So we can give you ideas on your particular
project of similar projects that have been
successful so you can understand how to conduct your your own project.
And you can filter the kind of best practice,
for example, if you want to find you can you
want to implement a project to avoid dropout
or I want to implement a project to create
new and I mean, virtual reality or I want to
create I want to integrate artificial intelligence.
I want to implement a new methodology
related to flip learning or whatever.
I can find examples here, curated examples
that can be helpful for for me in my project.
And well, this is the lab for emerging technologies.
Basically, as I mentioned, it's something
inside the hub and at the same time inside
the this lab is the EduBots platform that I
mentioned is the platform for creating
artificial intelligence tools very easily.
So right now we have developed, I think, more
than 60 tools or prototypes of artificial
intelligence in different subjects with different outcomes.
And we some of them are created to support
teachers and others are created to support learning from the students.
It means that they are used directly by the
students and other tools are only used by
the teachers as a support for their daily work.
And here you can see some examples.
We create the the these tools and we we have
three categories of of tools, proof of proof
of concept, which is the initial stage.
So a new technology that we think is promising
is first we do a proof of concept and we analyze
the results of the educational experience.
If it's satisfactory, then it goes to
the next level ready to do a pilot.
Then you you we can find a subject to do the
pilot and we evaluate again the satisfaction
and the impact and then it moves to the
final stage, which is ready to to use.
And for example, some some tools that we have
created is some tools to help teachers to
generate quiz tests or, for example, to
create drafts of educational material.
Also we created a tool to to raise awareness
among the teachers about the impact of artificial
intelligence on their practices, on their
essays, on the on the homework that the teacher sent to the students.
So students could evaluate if an AI is able
to generate the answer to your essay or to your practice.
So teachers could understand the impact
of this technology in their teaching.
Also we have immersive experiences with virtual
reality, different kind of games for authentic learning.
It means to situate the students in a kind of real environment.
It's not real, it's obviously simulated, but it's
it looks real and they have to take decisions in the process.
It's a kind of a role game.
And many other kind of of tools that we have
created and that we are evaluating right now.
Also on the other side, we have, as I mentioned,
the publishing office that has more than one
thousand five hundred printed titles, almost the same in
well, one thousand four hundred books and
twenty two journals and more than one thousand
e-books in twenty nine thematic collections.
And also the UNED Abierta, which is
the the unit to support open education.
We have more than one thousand one hundred fifty MOOCs.
This is the total number of MOOCs that we
have delivered so far in more than ten years.
And we have more than six hundred
thousand enrollments in these courses.
So we have a lot of activity here.
And this is an interesting way to provide open education to anyone.
And also we take the advantage for these students
to know the university and maybe some of them
finally sign up in some of the official degrees.
And also we have the digital content unit,
which is, as I mentioned, devoted to help
you in the development and design of interactive digital materials.
And the remote laboratories that I already mentioned.
Right now we have more than five thousand
students using these labs with more than forty
thousand practical sections conducted.
So tomorrow we can go to my lab and I can
show you some of them because I'm going to
show you only some the ones that are in my department.
But there are laboratories in many other departments.
Yes.
Oh, yes.
Thank you very much.
Yes, Angeles was asking me to explain the
difference between remote laboratories and virtual laboratories.
The difference basically is that remote
laboratories, you are accessing a physical equipment.
It's not a simulation.
You are really using something real, but from home.
And when you use a virtual laboratory, it's a simulation online.
You typically use a website.
The remote laboratory is also a website,
but connects you to something real.
So we have the real electronic equipment in
the lab and we have created a special software
to allow students to access and to program
and control this real equipment from home.
And typically they have a webcam that they can see the result.
For example, if it's a imagine a robotic arm
that the student can program, then the student
can see from the webcam that the robotic arm is moving as expected.
So tomorrow I think we can we can go on and see it a little bit.
So if you have any other question.
Now it's time for questions.
First of all, thank you very much.
It was really interesting about the MOOCs.
The number of the MOOCs are really impressive.
And in previous presentation, it was also
mentioned that you are non-officially like
working with the not non-officially, but
you are working with micro credentials.
So can you elaborate how you are using this
like from management perspective in the main
courses and what is the difference with the
micro credentials, how you are involved in this?
Yes, I can say that you are going to have a
special presentation maybe tomorrow, right?
Yeah.
On Wednesday.
Thank you.
Yeah.
And another question regarding the methodological
part, how you're organising it,
especially in interdisciplinary context.
How we organise?
In interdisciplinary context, the methodological
part of the developing the each and every course.
Yeah, actually, the methodology is
something that the teaching team decides.
So UNED provides a scaffolding and then the
teacher decides how to effectively do it in its subject.
Maybe some teachers want to do continuous evaluation, others not.
Some teachers want to use videos, others not.
Some teachers want to do flip learning or whatever.
So it's up to them.
But we have a unit specialised on quality assurance.
So they review the process and they say, OK, this is OK.
It's up to you how you organise it in a framework.
Thank you.
Thank you once again.
A lot.
Very impressive.
Really, very, very impressive to see how you are organising that.
And also it was mentioned in your presentation
and then in the previous presentation that
you have quite a lot of enrolled in the
certification and you look at the dropouts.
Definitely this somehow leads to good teaching
and leads to well preparing the courses.
And you mentioned that there are several units that look after it.
But at the same time, what I'm interested
in, how are you preparing the teachers?
You mentioned you have 14,000 teachers who work.
So this is a huge work to support them all with capacity building.
How is that done, for instance, in your
laboratory, those people who are working there?
How are you supporting them with the corresponding methodologies?
I don't know.
Good question.
We provide a lot of teacher training.
That's the main thing.
And then they decide how to how to apply it.
Yeah.
Yeah, maybe Achilles can also add function.
Just because I've been in charge of that for many years.
So in the Institute of Distance Education
that we have and that belongs to the vice
rectorate, we do have a planning for every year.
I mean, in training teachers in all these new
technologies, for instance, and of course,
the regular methodology that we do have.
But we have also one area because we have like
1,400 academic staff here at the faculties.
I mean, they are responsible for everything.
But then we have the 5,000 of the tutors.
So for tutors, we do have a program, an initial
program that is compulsory for all the tutors.
And then when they become like tenured tutors,
they should have also go through a course that is called Venido Fendi.
So that's for tutors.
They have their own program.
And then the academic staff, they do have a
first package of what it is, this university
and what do you have for your work,
your technological support and so on.
And also a lot of workshops and seminars continuously,
depending also on the new things that appear and that are necessary.
But also for research and I mean, there is
a full program of different workshops
along the year and it changes constantly.
No, they're not.
They're not.
But of course, the quality agency here is now
developing a program that is called Authentia for every university.
And all these things regarding innovation
and what are the trainings you have
done and so on will account for that.
Because I don't know, maybe I think that's
a general problem, but that for any
teacher, research has been the must.
So teaching has been like, well, OK, but it's also central activity.
So now I think the quality agency is pushing
more and developing a program, a specific
program, talking about what is an excellent
teacher or at least someone that is doing things correctly.
So I mean, participating in innovation and
participating in training and so on will be.
For our tutors, the initial program and the
tenure, let's say, programs are compulsory.
For our teachers, the academic staff here is like freedom of choice.
It's more difficult, but we are taking into account that.
Thanks.
First of all, the work you're doing here is really impressive.
My question, I will slightly change the topic.
So you mentioned that sometimes you arrange
exams here and in previous presentation, we
also heard that the university has a resource
centers kind of where the exams take place.
So is it the same practice all over the courses
in all over the program, in all the programs
that students have to take exams physically
or it's up to the faculty members and they
decide the way they will arrange it in
their courses or and as a continuation.
So you mentioned that there was an
outbreak of this AI tools or whatever.
Does it or is it a serious concern considering
the fact that the students have to take the
exams online or distance or how do you
elaborate this in your daily practices?
Yes, I think from my perspective, at least,
it's a big challenge because if students do
the practices from home, they can do it using an AI.
So you cannot your job as a teacher is to
ensure that the student gets these skills,
these competencies at the end of the process.
And if you are not able to do it, you are doing something wrong.
So we are working mainly through training
on explaining the impact of these AI tools
on your practices on how students can use
it and how you can evolve the way you create
your practices to avoid this problem.
Maybe you have to go more to face to face
evaluation again, to oral presentations again,
maybe to use more the tutoring system that
we have around the study centres along the
country because we cannot rely so much on distance practices anymore.
So this is one thing.
And regarding the practices, practices organisation,
as I mentioned in the first courses, we have
a lot of students, for example, in my faculty,
thousands of students, they cannot go, they
cannot come here physically, all of them.
That's why we have laboratories in many
study centres to do the practices there.
All of them, they do the same practice,
but in a study centre near their home.
And then in third or fourth grade that students
are less, they can come here and do the practices
here, because at the end, an engineer has to
play with the electronics and with things.
I don't know if there's some part of your question.
So is it the faculty member or teacher who
decides the evaluation criteria or is it some obligation for them?
No, no, they decide.
They have freedom to decide how the evaluation is going to be done.
OK, thanks.
Thank you so much for your wonderful presentation.
How long did it take to develop this kind of process at your university?
How many years?
Which process?
I mean distance education, so well developed.
50 years from the very beginning.
But you know, with arrival... Decided from the beginning, yeah?
We were designed as a distance university
since the beginning, 50 years ago.
But then we are evolving.
We have a continuous evolution with the technology.
We are integrating technology, but we are not only based on technology.
We use technology to adapt our model.
When Internet arrived, OK, we are now using Internet.
Then arrived the phones.
OK, we have also phones, but the methodology is more or less the same.
Then, OK, video lectures.
And now artificial intelligence.
But the methodology is not adapted to the
technologies, but technologies are adapted to the methodology.
I see.
Thank you so much.
I have three questions.
One is how big is your innovation team or team working on innovations?
Not so big.
So that's one.
Second question is, as you have solid experience
with innovations, probably much more than
other universities, how much Ministry of Education,
I don't know what the structure here, is using
your center as a kind of platform for piloting and advising others?
Like how much... What is the relationship between government
or policy structure and your university?
And how much other universities have similar
structures or what is kind of collaboration
between the big players testing how AI can be used in education?
That's second.
And third question is maybe it's more question for Angel.
It's about tutors.
So I'm tutoring students doing their final
dissertation, but I don't know when you mentioned
tutors what they are doing and how
tutoring element is part of the education.
I'm guessing, but I don't know.
That's all.
Thank you.
So regarding the team that we have, I think
it's difficult to say, but maybe in total
counting the digital content unit and open net
and I don't know, maybe 20 people or something like that.
Yeah, more or less, I think.
Yeah.
Because we are covering a lot of units in the university.
Yes.
In the half of educational innovation is just me.
Right now it's only me.
But yeah.
Also, regarding the other question of how we are
serving as inspiration to other institutions.
We were an inspiration, especially during the pandemic.
You know, in the pandemic, everyone had to
move to an online model or a distance learning model.
So UNED together with other online university
in Spain, we work together to provide some
guidelines to the rest of the universities on
how to do the teaching in these new conditions.
But the rest of the time, it's true that
their teaching is quite different than us.
We because also what most of the universities
did during the pandemic was to do video lectures
online all the time, which is something that we don't do.
We don't do too much synchronous sessions.
We our methodology is more asynchronous.
We provide materials and you study when you
have the time to do it, because we understand
that you have work, family and responsibilities
and you are studying with us because of that.
So we don't have this tight schedule, sessions or something like that.
So we provided our experience.
But I think at the end, the rest of educational
institutions did what they knew how
to do, which is to do a masterclass.
I think you are asking about how our tutoring system works.
Is that question?
Well, as Sergio mentioned, we were born in 1972.
At that time, there were no Internet.
And so we created a network of associated
centers all around the country and also outside.
In these local centers that are in big and
small cities, there are a body of tutors.
Tutors are partial time workers there.
So they have tutoring on site, but also
after we integrate Internet online.
So we meet all together.
I mean, the academic staff and the tutors,
we are all in our virtual courses together with the students.
And each tutor has a number of students to
take care of and they go to the local centers
and they deliver their on-site tutoring
weekly or each 15 days or something like that.
But just for explaining doubts, supporting
the students in developing their continuous
assessment, sometimes assessment also
of continuous practices and so on.
So they work together with the academic
staff that is responsible for the subject.
For instance, my subject is a subject of second year in psychology.
We are the largest, we have the largest number
of students in UNED and I have like 4,500 students.
That's the number.
We are a body of four full members here responsible
for the subject, the design, the materials and so on.
And we have something like 65 tutors all around the country.
So we have to manage.
That's why it's very interesting what Sergio
has said, they are working to improve the
coordination with our tutor team that we have
because I think it's an extremely important
source of human resources for our students.
So we do have this combining things.
One thing that is important, tutoring, so to
go to a centre or to connect to the centre
to receive tutoring is not compulsory.
So it's up to the student if he or she wants
to go to the local centre to receive this
tutoring or he or she can manage just with
all the materials and resources that we put in the virtual course.
But of course, something also important, a
virtual course is not a place without interaction at all.
We have forums and the academic staff is there
to answer all the doubts of the students together with the tutors.
Yes, tutors are fundamental in this online environment.
Imagine thousands of students in a forum
and you have to answer all the doubts.
That's impossible.
You have to organise the students with the tutors online also.
Maria, Maria, Maria, there is another doubt.
OK.
Thank you very much.
I have one question.
How often does this live sessions take place?
This forum, the sessions?
No, no, no.
But these are not live sessions.
It's a... Your question?
Yes, you leave the question and then the teacher answer.
Yes, but this is asynchronous.
It's totally asynchronous.
There is no live interaction.
OK.
Only in the exams, in the face to face exams.
Yes.
Also in the tutoring, if the student goes to the tutoring sessions.
You mentioned that in 2023 you developed a
strategy and institutional on the
inclusion of AI into teaching and learning.
Is it in English words and some words
so we could have a look at it or?
Not really, no.
Sorry.
We have some information, but mainly as is
internal information is mainly in Spanish.
Yes.
Yes, obviously it's public.
It's public.
Yes.
Information and have it interpreted or translated.
Yes.
It's a downloadable document, right?
So we can... Yeah, there are documents and also
diagrams and information in the website.
So we can provide you the link.
Does it in any way deal on how the students
should address, for example, using AI during
the learning process or something like that?
Yes, we, one of the MOOCs that we have in
OpenUnit is one focused on AI for students
where we explain the students the impacts,
the risks, and also the opportunities behind these challenges of AI.
That is very nice.
Thank you.
Yeah, welcome.
Thank you.
Wait, wait a second.
Oh, yeah.
Regarding the military services, at a
previous presentation we had it and how...
Basically my question would be, Faisal, that how
you are dealing with the different
stakeholders to organize and suit their needs?
Because whenever you are providing these military
services, like short courses or whatever courses,
not to avoid the dropouts and also this penetration institution.
So that's out of box thinking, so to say, right?
And how you are developing these new directions
and how you are dealing with the stakeholders to fulfill their needs?
I am afraid that I was not here in the previous session.
Angeles, it was a session about military service?
It was mentioned.
Oh, international.
I'm sorry.
My ear is not so good.
Please repeat the question because I
was thinking on another different topic.
Because we're short in time.
It's okay.
Okay.
Thank you.