Open University of Catalonia

About: Open University of Catalonia is a education organization based out in Barcelona, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Collaborative learning & Educational technology. The organization has 1943 authors who have published 4646 publications receiving 64200 citations. The organization is also known as: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya & UOC.

Returning after taking a break in online distance higher education: from intention to effective re-enrollment

Abstract: One of online distance learning’s positive attributes is its flexibility. However, the possibility of engaging in periods of non-enrollment (breaks) usually ends in students dropping out. In this p...

An SDN QoE-service for dynamically enhancing the performance of OTT applications

Abstract: This paper provides a brief overview and a vision for introducing a Quality of Experience (QoE) function for on-demand services or for premium users, based-on Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The proposed “QoE-service” can take advantage of the SDN global resource view and complementary QoE metrics to assure the desired performance for OTT applications by adopting traffic management mechanisms. This paper introduces the QoE-Service concept and SDN architecture and it presents a set of use cases that demonstrate its suitability and applicability to Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks.

Students' Perceptions about Online Teaching Effectiveness: A Bottom-Up Approach for Identifying Online Instructors' Roles.

Abstract: The topic of online instructors’ roles has been of interest to the educational community since the late twentieth century. In previous studies, the identification of online instructors’ roles was done using a top-down (deductive) approach. This study applied a bottom-up (inductive) procedure to examine not only the roles of online instructors from a student perspective, but also how well these roles are implemented in practice. In the first stage, roles were defined using factor analysis on a sample of 925 students. A questionnaire was created after an extensive literature review and in-depth interviews with experts. The methodology detected six roles: pedagogical, course designer, social, life skills promoter, technical, and managerial. In the second stage, students’ scores were projected over those factors to obtain the instructors’ performance in each role (the significance of the results was assessed using non-parametric tests). Main findings included: (i) the emergence of a new role, the life skills promoter; (ii) online scenarios becoming more transparent and intuitive due to syllabus design; (iii) the consideration of more audio-visual resources by instructors in asynchronous learning environments; and (iv) the value of offering guidelines to students for collaborative activities to reduce the level of frustration with these activities.