Exploratorium on Learning in Higher Education

UNIR facilitates an exclusive, innovative and high quality virtual model of higher education, which leans on a personalized, pro-active, and collaborative distance learning method of instruction. UNIR provides international courses, in two languages (English and Spanish), with lecturers and students across the world, along with a strong support team (ratio 1 support staff/20 students; 1 lecturer/20 students). There are premises in Spain (Logroño and Madrid), Argentina (Buenos Aires), and Brussels (Belgium)Santa Cruz (Bolivia), and a number of collaboration agreements with Latin American universities.

UNIR provided a two-folded Exploratorium:

1) as a workplace setting, with over 400 people in 4 different locations, all of them working with computers on R&D projects, academic processes, and support services (i.e. tutoring, legal, publishing, editing, technical, administrative, etcetera)

2) as university, with over 9.000 students and 400 teachers. UNIR develops a proprietary virtual campus, which combines functionalities of LMSs and Social Networks (SN). Along the academic year 2012-2013 the inter-relation between informal learning (via SN) and regular programmes (via LMS) will be a key research topic Both scenarios will facilitate the analysis and implementation of practices and trends from W1, WP2, and WP3, which will support, encourage, and improve the user experience (student-teacher-support staff) and the institutional objectives at the university.

The HE Exploratorium will engage, at least, 3 different Master degrees which involve 200 students, 60 teachers, and 20 staff members.

Some of the innovations practically implemented in our Lab. The rest of innovations supported by the Lab are described in pages 8-19 of the Integrated Labs Final Report (D4.2.2).