Abstract:

The recent changes in the educational paradigm due to the situation of the pandemic have entailed a profound transformation. The digital model of teaching and learning has revealed some problems and difficulties for which institutions and governments have dedicated a lot of effort trying to solve. Teaching and learning centers play a strategic role in addressing the changing needs of higher education, especially in this situation due to COVID. The UNITA initiative (http://www.univ-unita.eu/) is an ambitious project that aims to create a new model of integrated European university with more than 160k students and 13k staff members. Within the different levels that the alliance between the universities of Turin, Chambéry, Covilhã, Pau, Timisoara, and Zaragoza represents, the six university centers of the European initiative UNITA have built a network to share their experience in three key areas: the development of teaching that incorporates the professionalization of academic staff, the development of student learning and the integration of learning enhanced by the technology.

In this paper we present the activities and results, from the perspective of the University of Zaragoza team, of the joint work that has been carried out between members of the university community with different profiles, with the aim of achieving the exchange of practices in student-centered digital learning. A comparison between the connected campus models, taking as a reference the wide change we have experienced in the last year, is also presented. Integration within UNITA will be key to obtaining accurate and real results, and in which the changes and transformations that have been introduced in the the teaching-learning process, especially at the technological level, will play a central role. Each group has been in charge of analyzing key indicators that have made it possible to detail the problems and difficulties that the pandemic has caused in the teaching-learning process. These indicators will also serve to understand how each university has faced the new needs as well as their evolution. As it will be shown, virtual teaching, collaborative tools and much more tech-based methodologies and practices have arisen, but there are still some classical problems which coexist in the classroom during the teaching process.

Keywords:

Centers Network, UNITA, COVID, Digital Learning, Experience, Outcomes.