Improving sociocultural outcomes for students in the higher education through participation on virtual mobility: the ubicamp experience

Autores: Raquel Menéndez Ferreira, Aquilino Adolfo Juan Fuente , Melchor Gómez García , David Camacho Fernández
Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 33, no. Extra 6 (Parte B), 2017 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Promoting Graduates’ Mobility in Engineering Education: Towards Global Engineers), págs. 2050-2060
Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
- The new challenges in international engineering education needs to go further from traditional technical skills acquisitions,allowing future engineers to easily work within international teams. To do that, the acquisition of sociocultural elementsbecomes an essential skill for these future engineers. Traditionally, this acquisition has been done through popularEuropean programs such as ERASMUS programme. However, the current European context sometimes makes it difficultfor students developing this kind of physical mobility. For this reason, the Virtual Mobility (VM) concept has emerged asan alternative to support the education activities, which can facilitate international experiences of collaboration andsociocultural exchanges among students. This paper presents the main results generated from UbiCamp project basedon VM. The paper presents both, the formal definition of a software framework that allows to integrate traditional e-learning tools (as Moodle), with non-traditional sociocultural tools (as Virtual Worlds), and a complete Virtual World,designed and integrated in the UbiCamp framework, to provide a 3D highly immersive environment to stimulate thesociocultural immersion among students. Finally, some empirical results extracted from 60 students and 28 teachers whowere involved in this VM experience, are analyzed to show the potential of VM as a tool for international mobilityeducation.