INNVED: a collaborative virtual environment for teacher education

Abstract

This paper focusses on an experience of collaborative virtual environment which has been carried out within a b-learning secondary teacher education program based at Universidad Europea in Madrid. It is a compulsory MA program of 60 ECTS oriented to anyone seeking to teach at the secondary level in the Spanish education system. This learning experience was included in a 12-ECTS subject called “Teacher Innovation and Introduction to Educational Research”. The main aim of this subject is that students recognize the contribution of teacher innovation and educational research to improve the quality of their educational practice. For doing so, 87 students took part in the collaborative virtual environment “INNVED”, which was created within a semantics and social platform called “Gnoss”. After giving the overall background of the instructional design for this subject, a preliminary quantitative analysis is presented on students’ participation within INNVED community and its relation with their academic performance.