Universidad Internacional de La Rioja – UNIR

Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR), Spain, is a young 100% online university. UNIR provides international courses, in English and Spanish, and comprises an academic community of over 1.000 highly knowledgeable lecturers across the World, along with a strong team of more than 500 multidisciplinary staff members (including 200 tutors), working on research projects and support services. Student number keeps increasing exponentially: over 38.000 in 2020. It has premises in Spain (Logroño and Madrid), Colombia (Bogota), Argentina (Buenos Aires), Bolivia (Santa Cruz), Mexico DF (Mexico), Lima (Perú) and Miami (USA) along with a number of collaboration agreements with Latin American and European universities, mainly.

UNIR Research, the International Research Department of UNIR works on selected scientific and humanistic fields of study with particular focus on information and communication technologies (ICT) applied to education (Technology-Enhanced Learning), all of them designed for practical implementation and subsequent exploitation in the market.

Another strong field of work and research at UNIR is Innovation in education, aiming at a higher quality in education, which combines the study of good practices and innovative educational implementations. It supports new paradigms and ways of learning enabled by TEL like, i.e. Open Educational Resources, Open Course Ware, MOOCs, etcetera, with emerging structures and processes required for their appropriate management, implementation and exploitation.

Why we are participating in the project

UNIR has a great interest and experience in the field of Open Education, Educational Technology, Learning Analytics, Quality assurance in Higher Education and development of dynamic support services for the educators’ Community. This project is in line with UNIR core interest and area of work, and it represents a step further with respect to previous projects that we previously helped to develop, such as EduHack and OpenMed.

Our role in the project

UNIR will be responsible for:

  • Leading activities conducting to the realization of the Directory for Learning opportunities and Open Educational resources for Digital Education
  • Contributing to all project activities
  • Contributing to the Dissemination of the EdDiCo project results (regionally, nationally and internationally)

Our Team

Daniel Burgos

Daniel Burgos

Vice-Chancellor

works as Vice-chancellor for International Projects and UNESCO Chair on eLearning. In addition, he holds an ICDE Chair in Open Educational Resources (and leads the Institute on Educational Innovation and Technology (UNIR iTED), and the Master on eLearning & Social Networks. His interests are mainly focused on Learning Analytics, Adaptive and Informal eLearning, Social Networks, eGames, and eLearning Specifications, Open Education and Open Science.

Stefania Aceto

Stefania Aceto

Senior researcher and project manager

Since 1998 she is active in research and policy advisory activities concerning innovation in learning; technology enhanced learning and internationalisation of Higher Education. Since 2015 she is a senior researcher and Project manager at UNIR, working on projects related to quality assurance, game-based learning, social inclusion, digital competences and Open Education

Aida Lopez

Aida Lopez

Senior researcher

She is a PHD in Sociology, in the area of methodology of social research and communication by the UCM. She works as Senior Project Researcher and Expert in the Development of Digital Competencies and Social Inclusion at ITED, UNIR. Also, she teaches in the Humanities area of UNIR, in the Degree of Social Work and Master of Social Intervention.