«Alacena», An Open Learning Design Repository for University Teaching

Abstract

Being a teacher means being involved in the design of learning activities. The teaching profession has become a «profession of knowledge», not because knowledge was or is the legitimate component of the profession, but because the teacher is the designer of learning environments and has the ability to design the spaces where knowledge is being produced. But these learning environments have long been regulated to the privacy of the classroom environment with student complicity. One positive aspect of the launch of the European Higher Education Area has been to bring greater transparency to the process of designing teaching and student learning. Our objective in this study was to identify, represent and document a wide variety of learning designs made by experienced and innovative teachers. We hope this repository will be available and accessible to every teacher through the Internet. The participants in this study were 58 teachers mainly from universities in Andalusia and the five branches of knowledge. From interviews we proceeded to represent all the learning sequences, available in the repository of sequences that we named «Ala cena». This repository is accessible on our research group’s website (http://prometeo.us.es/idea). The conclusions of our study were that there are innovative learning designs aimed at promoting a greater understanding of what students learn through their involvement in processes of inquiry and/or collaboration, and they are representative of good teaching practices in universities..