Volume III, Issue 1. “CampusVirtuales” Journal
http://www.revistacampusvirtuales.es/
Special Editors
Prof. Dr. Daniel Burgos, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR Research)
Dr. Rubén González Crespo, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR, School of Engineering)
Dr. Fabio Nascimbeni, MENON Network
Rationale
Modern universities require radical and immediate efforts with regards to Mass Media. They need to combine academic and research excellence with professional practice. The long-lasting and successful life of European and Latin American universities shows that in most of the cases, the academic part prevails. The connection with the Market is more complex and intertwines sometimes professional skills with pure general or academic abilities. It creates a hybrid system which might not be validated enough. The utility of resources and technological structures plays a vital role in this wide range of courses, teaching methodologies, learning strategies, official regulations, social requirements, and many other factors which represent a challenge of concilitation and adaptation to the media, the user and the time.
Technology, as a good tool, responds to the hand which makes use of it. This implies a similar level as a craftsman. The better and the more adapted the tool, with the excellent skills of the craftsman, the better the results. Our teachers and support staff need cutting-edge, reliable tools, which are adapted to specific requirements. Also, students require and benefit from the same technology. In this context, the decentralization of services and resources represents a significant breakthrough for the university community and, in general, for any user (teachers, students or managers). This distribution includes user data, behavior, interaction, performance, compliance of administrative formalities and, in general, the university life that any academic member can benefit from on a daily basis.
This special issue concentrates on all these resources, contents, methodologies, systems, regulations, skills, recognitions, recommendations, data analysis, approaches, standards, user experiences, pilot experiments, and more, which revolve around decentralization, aggregation and the integration of the university model.
Topics
- Content and service aggregation
- Distributed services, decentralized storage and Cloud computing
- Distributed contents and learning methods
- Learning Management Systems, Social Networks and integration of data sources and educational resources
- Virtual Passport and credit recognition
- Recovery and analysis of data from multiple sources
- Personalized learning pathways according to the user’s performance and behavior, inside and outside the classroom
ContextCampus Virtuales is a scientific journal of multidisciplinary research, published by the Campus Virtuales University Network (http://www.campusvirtuales.es), regarding the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education. It has been created with a twofold aim, to gather researchers’ personal experiences and of institutional virtual campus as well.
The Spanish and international academic community directly concerned by eLearning in Higher Education is experiencing an intense and prolific period of project implementation in the area of ICT in education. We are at a stage when traditional education systems are deeply changing, at an unquestionable moment for “change and progress”. Virtual Campuses are now a natural extension of Higher Education institutions, and the international community of professionals are facing new challenges, generated by new modalities of education and the introduction of ubiquitous and social technologies in and outside the classroom.
In this special issue we wish to highlight the potential and the most relevant experiences of University in the Cloud, as well as the main challenges Virtual Campuses in Higher Education will face.