A System to Manage Non-Formal Higher Education Activities

Abstract

In addition to formal courses, higher education usually involves other non-formal activities, such as seminars, workshops, and conferences. Many times, there is a lack of institutional support for managing these activities, so the organizers are responsible for such management, which implies a significant extra effort. In this paper, we describe a system developed in the Computer Science School at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, whose goal is to facilitate the management and organization of these activities in order to free the organizers from some of these tasks. Furthermore, this paper describes a case study concerning how the system was used at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, in the context of the Zaragoza Linguistics series of seminars and cultural diffusion initiatives.