Abstract:

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is the objective of the Bologna Declaration to create more comparable, compatible and coherent systems of higher education in Europe. In order to adapt the universities to EHEA is necessary the development of systems based on the use of new technologies helping the educators to set-up powerful learning experiences for students. Computers, Internet, and other tools offer the promise of significant improvements in teaching and learning not only using electronic mails or forums, else for virtual teaching, sharing information, and so on.
It is evident that Universities need to perform a big change in several lines, not only in the teaching-learning models, else in the quantity, quality and type of services the University offers to the society, which involves the introduction of new management and organization measures, control and quality assurance of education, and modernization of the University through the full implementation of new technologies in all university areas.
By other hand, Ubiquitous computing research is characterized primarily by a concern with potential future computational worlds. This notion of research proposed by Weiser situates the research as the initial steps upon a path of technological development inspired by an explicit vision of possible future relationships between people, practice, and technology.
An interesting technology that has emerged in recent years and which seems an ideal possibility to the development of pervasive system is Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. This technology combines the RFID technology with mobile phones allowing the simple, easy and awareness user interaction with an augmented world with smart objects.
NFC technology fulfils the “touching paradigm”. That is, just only touching and smart object, you can gather information and services. NFC is a wireless proximity communication technology allowing the data transference over a distance up to 10cm. The major advantage of NFC over other wireless communication technologies is its simplicity: transactions are initialized automatically, simply by touching a reader, another NFC device or a NFC compliant transponder. Moreover, NFC can give additional functionality to a mobile device, like using it as a contactless credit card or as a contactless bus ticket. Bluetooth and WiFi connections can be established simply by touching a transponder.
We think that the building of smart universities scenarios composed by augmented objects could be an effective solution for the development of the new university model. This university model would bring services closer to society, enhancing their quality and user satisfaction. With this aim we are working in the development of several pervasive applications in the university environments. These applications are aimed at solving various aspects of teaching and the quality of it, and the services the university provides to society.
In this paper we present a brief description of our proposal for the building of a pervasive university. So, NFC based systems devoted to the fulfilment of the student attendance, university smart posters providing the student organizational, research, teaching, etc., information and university services; applications aims to improve the study student motivation through games based on competition, strategy, ingenuity and prizes, as well as other applications currently in development are described in this paper.

Keywords:

University, EHEA, Bologna Declaration, Ubiquitous services, Near Field Communication, Mobile applications.