La docencia de Teoría de la Comunicación y la Información en entornos virtualesla UOC como experiencia pionera

Resum

During the last years we attended an increase of the use of the New Information and Communication Technologies (TIC) in the scope of university education. The process of adaptation to the European Higher Education Area suggests a gradual incorporation of virtual environments for education and learning to all the graduate and postgraduate offer. And this process affects in the same way to all the educational modalities. In the case of the teaching and learning of Communication Theories, this phenomenon is not always waking together with a parallel reframing of the courses' content. Often, the use of virtual spaces is reduced to an instrumental question, an attempt of technological modernization that, sometimes, seems to obey more to public image questions than to the result of a reflection about the potentialities and the limits of a new educational system. Thus, the creation of virtual classrooms does not necessarily lead to a true qualitative jump. This article describes the proposal developed since 1994 by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), placing e-learning as its main basis. On the one hand, all the features of this system of virtual education are presented, stimulating the creation of completely virtual, active and dynamic communities, where the communication between all the participants is constant. On the other hand, the planning and the design of concrete formative actions in the field of Communication Theories are also included, detailing all the assessing and tuition systems that contribute to build a collaborative relation between responsible professors, consulting professors and students of each virtual classroom. Finally, all the challenges raised by this system within the framework of the new European Area will be analyzed, as well as we will deepen in the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal, trying to bring the light of the experience and data accumulated during the last courses.