Opening Up Higher Education: An E-learning Program on Service-Learning for University Students

Abstract

Higher education in Europe has been slowly implementing service-learning courses at the university in the last years. It allows students to take part in a community project as part of their course, providing a progressive learning experience while meeting societal needs. Madrid-based CEU University has been implementing service-learning elective courses on-site for the last five years through educational programs carried out in Fab Lab Madrid CEU, the digital fabrication laboratory based at the university. Thanks to it, students use digital fabrication technologies to design and make low-cost devices in cooperation with communities in need. As in the last two years, students have been increasingly taking their elective courses on-line; the number of students demanding e-service-learning courses has increased. To meet this demand, we have started to design an e-service-learning program, providing students remote access to Fab Lab technologies through the NEWTON Project platform and studying the outcomes of such effort.