What is it?
ITLab stands for Innovation & Technology Laboratory. This university service provides students, teachers and staff members with the necessary knowledge about leading edge innovations and technologies useful in their daily work.
It is a goal of our ITLab to create a stronger culture of innovation throughout the university community.
The Universitat Internacional de Catalunya is working on a global strategic plan in which innovation and technology are considered key elements for the future of the organization.
What do we do?
The Innovation Challenge
The technology sector is running fast and requires a plan to keep up with the latest innovations. There is traditionally a gap between the education sector, usually slow to learn from others, and the technology area. Currently there is a strong feeling that education institutions must take full advantage of the available Information and Communication Technology benefits and our university is not an exception. The challenge consists in intelligently applying technology in order to have a measurable impact on teaching methodologies, learning outcomes, stimulating the way learners learn and teachers teach.
The Harnessing Technology Plan
Our Innovation Lab in Barcelona has been born from the experience of twenty years applying technology to the university internal management processes since the inception of internet: intranet, email services, web presence, backups, security... For more information about the history of the Information Systems Department you can read the article «A Comprehensive University MIS».
All those past years allowed us to learn from the difficulties about making technology useful for our needs. We work with open-source software, choose from a myriad of possibilities, spend a lot of time developing, testing, enhancing, adapting software to user needs...
All those activities were very time consuming for us to be centered and concentrated only on technology and innovation. That is the reason why a group of four former members of the Information Systems Department have created the ITLab team. We have established a list of targets in order to put into practice the strategy to take full advantage of technology.
Targets we want to meet
- focus on the global strategic plan of the university to follow the same path
- use innovation systematically to deliver better performance and outcomes
- design services that are popular, effective, easy to use and recognized as leading edge
- create a stronger culture of innovation to transform working habits throughout the university community
- make our university be better known for its innovation and applied technology
How our ITLab will do it
- programming daily meetings for brainstorming and tracking of projects as well as scheduled meetings with external people
- establishing periodical informative sessions with our supervisors to know if we are following the right path
- being present at technological, academic and business events
- exploring the latest development and innovations out there to anticipate change
- being rigorous in closing down the less successful projects while enhancing the most innovative.
- bringing coherence to the deployment of projects across the organisation, marking guidelines.
- transferring our results, once digested, to the university community: students, teachers or staff members
- increasing our presence on the Internet to publicize our progress, improvements and applications
- establish alliances with companies in the technology sector
How to make us known
The implementation of all those targets and ways to accomplish them will lead our university to be better known outdoors for its applied technology services. That is why we find it useful to translate some of the logical goals previously mentioned into a list of measurable objectives.
Measurable Objectives
These are some of the elements that we have created for you to know about us:
- a blog to keep in touch with the needs of our community users
- a public list of current projects
- training courses for the software development team and external partners
- training sessions and workshops for teachers and staff members to communicate innovation
- periodical Innovation Pills to share new ideas or solutions
- public exhibitions to show the achievements accomplished in the world of innovation and technology
Website Structure
Our ITLab blog will be the front-end of all our working progress in Barcelona. We have devised the site to show all measurable objectives. There is a different web page for each one.