ENCOURAGING STUDENTS AND PROFESSORS TO USE THE MULTIMEDIA REPOSITORY OF THE UNIVERSITAT POLITÈCNICA DE VALÈNCIA

For several years, professors from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) have been populating RiuNet (https://riunet.upv.es/), its internal institutional repository, with a wide variety of multimedia resources, like screencasts, videos, virtual laboratories, OpenCourseWare and Massive Open Online Courses. The idea behind this repository is to enable students to review at any place and any time the contents of a given class, laboratory, or specific technical concept, whereas professors may share and reuse available resources. These multimedia resources are public and can be accessed from anywhere and by anyone through Internet.

A previous internal UPV’s project for education innovation and improvement, studied the use that students actually make of these multimedia resources in the context of different subjects of several degrees (related to engineering, architecture and tourism). This study revealed that although the repository holds more than 35.000 learning objects (by November 2017), around 30% of the students declares that they ignore the existence of these resources. However, more than 70% of students makes a massive use of YouTube to consume videos with educational purposes. In general, the only online material students use from the UPV’s learning management system is the slides provided by professors.

This year, a new educational project has started at UPV with the aim of increasing the knowledge about UPV’s institutional repository and promoting its didactic impact, both among students and professors. With that purpose in mind, different actions have been defined to encourage the use of this repository among the students of several courses and degrees, so they can learn how to find valid and reliable resources. Likewise, other initiatives have been defined to promote the use of the repository among professors. Finally, based on the lessons learned from this project, a series of proposals will be presented to UPV’s management to promote the knowledge and use of that institutional repository. All these actions and proposals will be presented and discussed in the final paper.