OPEN COURSE WARE AND MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSE EXPERIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CANTABRIA

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). Adapting to the changes proposed by the treaty led to the incorporation of the new Information and Communications Technology (ICT) into the 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 also establishes a comparison 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 the Spanish institutions. Moreover, after analyzing the data, it has been found that only 15 of the 50 studied Spanish institutions have consolidated some of their MOOC courses. In that sense, the UC is one among the five that have consolidated more MOOC courses. Additionally, the institutions offering both types of courses have been checked, finding that both types of courses are offered in 25 institutions, being the UC one of them. Focusing on data from UC and according to the classification proposed by the 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 as 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 in MOOC courses, being Social Sciences area the most active one, and Science and Technology the least active. Interestingly, at the UC the areas with a higher number of courses offered are not the same in OCW and MOOC courses. In this study a certain complementarity between OCW and MOOC can be observed, and both types of open learning are used to meet the learner and teacher's needs. Finally, we can conclude that according to the available data taken from platforms such as Universia, MIRIADA X, Open Education Europa, Tutellus, and 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.