An effective way to plan a course for EHEA subjects: Translating didactical guides for a planning model

UNED (Spanish University for Distance Education) is the largest public distance education university in Spain with over 220,000 students, 1600 lecturers and 2000 administrative staff. Actually, the new degrees have been started using the EHEA (European Higher Education Area) directives. So, as it indicates in EHEA specifications, an online course must focus on personal mandatory activities as part of the evaluation model. In order to achieve the EHEA requirements, a didactic guide based on activity items (assessments, tasks, forums discussion, etc.) has been produced by lecturers in order to describe the overall work that students have to do in the course. To support that, an organization and planning system by blocks has been created where information (resources and activities) can be added by teachers from many sources and arranged flexibly. In the paper, a real scenario with two subjects of an official master´s degree will be presented. These subjects meet the EHEA requirements. In this case, the way the didactic guide can be “translated” for the planning tool in a simple manner will be presented. Also satisfaction results that have been obtained from student surveys will be presented, in order to validate the use of this new tool and its impact on student learning.