by Marcos Cánovas & Richard Samson
The BLEARN AUTONOMY project has set up an online platform for participants to share teaching proposals and comment on them. Various approaches and teaching strategies have been put forward on the platform, allowing teachers from project institutions to share experiences, as outlined in this short video.
The University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia (UVic-UCC) took charge of the design and implementation of the platform, which uses the open-source Mahara portfolio. On the BLEARN AUTONOMY platform, participants choose a group to share their proposals with (Professional Orientation for Students, Reflective Learning with Portfolios, Learning in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Teaching Strategies). Each group has adopted a template which participants can copy and fill in. The template includes items such as title, author(s), context, social organisation, materials, aims, activities, assessment, planned outcomes and peer feedback requested. Other BLEARN AUTONOMY participants can comment on proposals based on the feedback requested or other relevant considerations. Such comments constitute a creative, reflective space for providing useful insights and suggestions for improvement of proposals.
Besides UVic-UCC (Spain), teachers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain), the Catholic University of Lyon (France), the University of Minho (Portugal), the University of Stavanger (Norway) and the University of Warsaw (Poland) have shared experiences on the platform so far. This has opened up a dialogue between teaching staff across countries and universities.
The platform is now open to external participants. Multiplier events held in Barcelona and Braga served to circulate information and invite new participants. The manual for teachers created by the project team includes a sign-up link: https://forms.office.com/e/GZEdkAKprf. As of 15 March 2023, 25 external participants had signed up. These participants can comment on existing proposals and share new ones. Page templates in Spanish and Catalan have been added to those in English, and a new group (Estratègies docents / Estrategias docentes) has been added for participants who prefer to communicate in Catalan or Spanish.