Abstract:

A new stage in the Spanish university teaching began with the Bologna Treaty signed in 1999, which aims to create a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) began. Adapting to the changes proposed by the treaty led to the incorporation of the new Information and Communications Technology(ICT) into university teaching field.

Spanish universities have made an effort to adapt to the changes accompanying the Bologna Treaty, including the use of ICT. In this context, the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and the Open Course Ware (OCW) project are two of the main tools designed to share knowledge. According to the available data, the generation of MOOC and OCW courses places Spain among the countries with the highest contribution in the field of sharing information remotely worldwide.

The University of Cantabria (UC), in its commitment to ICT, has developed programs such as Aula Virtual and UC Abierta websites, which gather platforms like Moodle, Blackboard, OCW, and MOOC. These Open Educational Resources (OERs) allow students to get virtual access to the contents of some subjects taught at UC, to use the additional documentation of subjects, or to satisfy their curiosity about subjects of general purpose with freedom of time and location.

This work aims to estimate the evolution of the ICTs at UC, and it presents an analysis of the OCW and MOOC courses offered from its initial development and their relation with other Spanish institutions in which these OERs also are available.

Since 2007, the UC has shared a total of 175 OCW courses; on the other hand, in a period of 2 years 28 MOOC courses have been broadcast. This means that, in both cases, the UC is one of the ten most active universities in the ranking of Spanish institutions.

Moreover, after analyzing the data, it has been found that only 14 of the studied Spanish institutions have consolidated some of their MOOC courses. In that sense, the UC is one of the five which has consolidated more MOOC courses. Additionally, it has been studied the institutions offering both types of courses, finding that both are offered in only 17 institutions, being the UC one of them.

Focusing on data from UC and according to the classification proposed by Bologna Treaty, it has been found that the percentage of OCW courses sorted by knowledge area, are linked directly to the graduate studies taught at the UC. In campus bases teaching as well online teaching the Engineering and Architecture area has the highest percentage of courses, whereas the Arts and Humanities area shows the lowest percentage.
According to the data, a different classification is found at MOOC courses, being Social Sciences area the most active one, and Science and Technology the less active. Interestingly, at the UC the areas with a higher number of courses offered are not the same in OCW and MOOC.

Currently, we are analyzing the data in order to know whether OCW is more geared to university studies, and whether MOOC has a more general purpose. In this preliminary study it can be observed a certain complementarity between OCW and MOOC, and both are used to meet the learner and teacher’s needs.

We can conclude that according to the data taken from platforms such as Universia, MIRIADA X, Open Education Europa, Tutellus, the website of each institution, the UC is one of the most active universities using ICTs in Spain, making therefore a valuable contribution to generalizing the use of ICT’s in the teaching-learning process.

Keywords:

Analysis, University of Cantabria, OCW, MOOC.