Abstract:

University of Minho’s Distance Education Project is an ambitious initiative aiming to open university knowledge to society, attracting students worldwide to study at a distance in this young University located in the north of Portugal.

The project offers online courses with 2 to 5 ECTS in mainstream research domains, bridging the gap between university and society.
In two years, 12 online courses were designed, developed and implemented for more than 1500 students worldwide. Offering courses in Portuguese, Spanish and English, the project aims to target online students regardless of their origin, facilitating digital access to the University of Minho, its teachers and knowledge, contributing to internationalization.

So far, the online courses involved 49 teachers, the production of 241 educational videos and other contents in text and audio.
Each year, the University of Minho’s teachers are trained to engage with e-learning technology and pedagogy. Teachers are involved in a b-learning course about distance education, design, development and implementation. During the b-learning course, teachers design a course of their own and at the same time they are online students, and learn about online timing, pedagogy and technology. At the end of the course, the participants learned how to design an online course, to produce content and to evaluate students at a distance.

Following this training, teachers formalize the course they created (ECTS) with the university senate, in line with the distance education regulation, and begin their own online courses development, oriented by a team of online education experts that advise on course design, support content production, the use of technologies and the contact with students.

By 2020 University of Minho intends to increase its student’s numbers by 30% and, hopefully, the distance education initiative will be a major contributor to accomplish this aim.
 

Keywords:

Online education, distance education, University of Minho, e-learning courses, b-learning, online teachers training.