The value of e-Learning

Situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic make ever more visible an area that the University of the Balearic Islands has been committed to since 1997 with the creation of the Campus Extens project. Through this service, the university began developing teaching support strategies through videoconferencing—an area where the UIB has been a pioneer amongst Spanish institutions.

Known today as Campus Digital, it accompanies, mentors and guides lecturers based on their requirements. Of course, it also works in close collaboration with other services and offices at the University of the Balearic Islands.  

All this is possible thanks to the availability and active participation of lecturers at the university, who work hard on developing teaching support strategies that promote users attaining the objectives, skills and abilities sought on each degree programme and subject.

Digital Transformation

Nowadays, university students tend not to take notes, but rather use learning techniques that do not always align with those used by their lecturers.

In order to see how younger generations study and to create a model enabling us to adapt to future changes, the University of the Balearic Islands has implemented the UIB Campus Digital 40.0 project, based on active listening through debate techniques inherent to design thinking, as well as workshops with participating lecturers.

UIB 40.0 enables us to set up dialogues with our students with a view to unlocking their narrative approaches, ways of understanding and studying, how they structure information and how lecturers can encourage participation.

Thanks to the results seen so far, the university is constantly enhancing tools for lecturers, creating training, support and advice plans.

We understand that providing suitable methodological strategies with the necessary rigour for each subject and seeking out improved student learning is beneficial not only in the classroom, but also in society in general, for when graduates join the labour market. 

How? A Content Factory

Ensuring that what you want to say reaches its intended audience is not as easy as it seems, and this is especially true for university teaching.
This is why our lecturers can count on the university's support whenever they need it, whether this be to structure methodologies or to produce digital material to help teach courses.

This support is possible thanks to the FACTORIA programme that includes preparing, producing and monitoring videos, podcasts and other formats. The programme constantly takes into account that first and foremost, the objectives, skills and abilities to be attained must be clear in order to create content that may or may not require digital tools as a support or back-up.

The training material produced by the lecturing team—whether on their own or with support from the University of the Balearic Islands—is made available to students on the digital classrooms for each subject.

The Art of Communicating

There is no problem when it comes to using the Aristotelian structure of rhetoric: introduction, body and conclusion map a narrative strategy that works well.

Based on what we have seen in the UIB 40.0 programme, however, our students go one step further. This generation has shown us that starting with a conclusion or a future promise, rather than the traditional structure, works and helps them understand the knowledge we seek to pass on, which then improves their pace of learning.

This is just one of the factors helping us progress as lecturers and explain our subject syllabus. And there are more—some of which you can hear in our chat with a lecturer in the podcast linked below. 

Related Links

 

There is further information, as well as tools and courses, available on the University of the Balearic Islands intranet, on both the Student and Teaching Staff Portals.