Educational Innovation María Luisa Sein-Echaluce University of Zaragoza María de Luna, 3 50014-Zaragoza +34976761979 mlsein@unizar.es Ángel Fidalgo-Blanco Technical University of Madrid Rios Rosas, 21 28003-Madrid +34913367046 angel.fidalgo@upm.es Neuza Pedro University of Lisbon Alameda da Universidade 1649-013 Lisboa +351 21 794 36 90 nspedro@ie.ulisboa.pt ABSTRACT An effective way to understand, improve and apply educational innovation is through the analysis of good practices. Sharing the acquired knowledge in the development and application of good practices helps teachers to implement educational innovation. Good practices help to reduce the teachers’ effort and to contribute structural to the educational institutions. This paper presents the good practices of the track “Educational Innovation” at the conference TEEM’15. They are organized in 5 lines corresponding to tendencies on educational innovation: Learning Communities, Learning personalization/Adaptive learning, Training and assessment of teamwork, New learning models and Innovation in online learning methods. Categories and Subject Descriptors • Applied computing➝Education Keywords Educational innovation; Learning communities; Adaptive learning; Teamwork competence; Learning contents management systems. 1. INTRODUCTION Although hard to delimitate the concept of educational innovation is been increasingly adopted in the education and training fields, more strongly in this last few years. In this track we embrace the following definition for educational innovation: a particular idea, project or strategy that is taken in to improve the educational process and that reveals to be new and/or to promote changes in the context that adopts. This definition inherently includes in the educational innovation the following characteristics: i) an intentional basis, as any innovation has to be deliberately adopted, ii) a transformative nature for the context in question, iii) the chase for an incremental solution, and iv) the production of improvements in the teaching-learning processes. Actually, the majority of teachers focus the educational innovation on the students. Teachers usually implement innovative experiences in order to improve learning, to increase students’ motivation or to promote an active participation of students in their own learning process. In addition, teachers undertake educational innovation in an isolate way, with a local scope and without the required time to check their effects and to develop proposals that are useful and transferable. Yet, there are educational innovations with a more transversal and global scope, such as the massive open online courses (hereinafter MOOCs). This type of innovation usually grows up very fast and generates intense debates at the beginning [1; 2] and therefore requires multiple studies that can understand their benefits, solve their inherent problems (such as the high dropouts and the validity of certificates, in the example of MOOCs) and provide its consolidation. Other type of educational innovation is based on research for the inclusion of new methodologies. This type is framed on the called “tendencies in innovation” and it incorporates learning analytics [3], gamification [4], informal training [5], etc. This type of innovation requires interdisciplinary teams, financial resources, cooperation between research teams and practitioners, as well as the adoption of work approaches that are based on the results provided by R&D&i projects. It is also relevant to see that some “old” methods, such as collaborative learning/teamwork and personalized/adaptive learning, whose benefits are widely proved but that require enormous effort from the teachers to follow up, are having a new relevancy with the use of the information and communication technologies (ICT) [6; 7]. The educational innovation can be seen as a crossroads between the different types of innovation mentioned above [8]. At this moment the digital university is real, it become an academic reality but it did not necessarily transformed the different aspects of learning in higher education. Educational innovation is the engine that really transforms learning, but for the transformation process to be effective, it must synchronize the new academic services with the new learning methods. In any case, independently of the type of educational innovation we are considering, it is necessary to spread the experiences and research developed around this topic. In that sense, the track of Educational Innovation in TEEM15 has two main objectives: to create crossroads between different types of innovation and to contribute with “oil” to the motion of the learning transformational engine [9]. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. TEEM '15, October 07 - 09, 2015, Porto, Portugal Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-3442-6/15/10…$15.00 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2808580.2808592 73