A higher education social network to share and promote teaching innovation experiences

Abstract

This paper presents a social network specializing in higher education teaching innovation, InEdUn (Innovación Educativa Universitaria, http://inedun.campusandaluzvirtual.es). InEdUn is the result of two inter-university teaching innovation projects (TIPs). InEdUn site allows faculty to spread and share achievements emerging from TIPs such as Open Educational Resources, OER; teaching and learning experiences in engineering; new supporting services to improve learning. Furthermore, it provides the creation of learning communities that foster collaboration and exchange of ideas among higher education faculty members. Both services can be integrated into existing web sites such as higher education teaching innovation portals. The website not only encourages contact between active innovation researchers to promote the creation of inter-university projects, but also incorporates valuable design features such as: federated login for using same login credentials from Higher Education Institutions or Research Centres, web searching and navigation facilities to locate contents, a recommendation system, sharing TIPs or collaboration proposals on social networks, adding comments about projects or collaboration proposals by the innovation community. At the present moment, the project has received positive comments and reviews, and we will continue previous plans to spread the system among several Andalusian Higher Education Institutions.