Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia Visit Website: http://www.uned.es

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), based in Spain, is the most important distance education university in the Spanish speaking world. Since 2000, when they ran they first pilot programme, their main e-learning platform has been WebCT.

Innova Desarrollo Tecnológico (http://www.innova.uned.es/index.adp) is a unit set up by the University’s Institute of Distance Education (IUED) to develop innovative technology as is needed for quality distance education. The Institute teaches continuing education, postgraduate and adult education programmes within UNED. Innova chose dotLRN as their main platform for the following reasons:

• Flexibility, since it could be adapted to the language and university’s processes;
• Ease of administration in contrast to WebCT which they found difficult to administer.
• Cost advantage, as compared to the recently increased licensing costs of the other available platforms.

They are now using dotLRN to teach to 4,500 students in 16 courses through 500 sessions a day. The system runs on a Linux and Oracle platform.

Innova is also collaborating in the internationalisation efforts with the OpenACS community. The dotLRN system being used now is based on ACES and has been translated to Spanish. Innova is working in a making a Spanish version of the new dotLRN also available in the short term. Innova is also working on a document management system using XML-DocBook and EML.