ATENEA UPC and the new "Activity Stream" or "Wall" feature

Abstract

The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya–Barcelona Tech (UPC), has added a new feature to its ATENEA UPC e-Learning platform based on Moodle. ATENEA UPC Service is UPC’s e-Learning platform which supports the Bachelor and Master studies, both face-to-face and blended. This new feature, called "Activity Stream" or "wall", allows progress in the implementation of methodologies based on social learning and mobile learning within the field of university studies. The Institut de Ciències de la Educació (Education Sciences Institute - ICE) leads the educational aims of the platform, and UPCnet -UPC’s ICT services company- offers the service and carries out the technical evolution projects of the platform (change of versions, development of new features, ...) The ICE, teachers at UPC and UPCnet, through working groups and projects in ATENEA Teaching Innovation LABs, evolve and test the new features of the platform that will later incorporate to UPC’s ATENEA Service. The aim of this presentation is to explain the pedagogical motivation of the initiative, the feature’s design process, the technological development done and the result of the actual experience carried out between February and June 2012 within the framework of the official engineering studies taught at the Escola d'Enginyeria de Telecomunicació i Aeronàutica in Castelldefels (EETAC).