Nowadays, social media have become a major marketing tool for businesses. But, in addition to being an excellent tool for managing the relationship with customers, social media are also used by companies for many other purposes. This article analyses these other uses.

UOC lecturer Albert Sangrà is considered a leading international expert on the use of information and communication technologies in education and training. In this interview, he reflects on key aspects of e-learning, including its conceptual foundation, modalities and influence on traditional campus-based universities. Dr Sangrà also addresses topical issues in this area, such as the development of massive open online courses (MOOC), development and assessment of competences in virtual environments, application of e-learning in companies, and collaboration between business and universities. The main conclusion drawn in the interview is that institutions that opt to focus on e-learning, whether or not they are universities, should do so in a strategic way. They also need to understand that e-learning is not just a matter of content development: it requires a specific teaching methodology and long-term planning. Also, despite the distance that has grown between companies and universities recently, he thinks they have no choice but to work together in this area.

The paper analyzes the role of e-vocational training in the achievement of new employability conditions that require the emergence of networking, knowledge economy and knowledge society. Under the analytical framework of skill biased technological change (e-SBTC) and from the results of three empirical analysis, four main conclusions have been obtained. First, e-vocational training is not yet strong enough to break the training gap. That is, e-vocational training of workers occurs mainly in more educated and digital skilled-based workers. Second, e-vocational training is revealed as a qualified instrument to improve employability, particularly on the dimensions of acquired skills and satisfaction with the educational design, but less with the training labour applicability. Third, the vast majority of firms, with no structural change, has a problem of relative over-education. That is, they don’t meet the association between a higher educational level and a higher wage. And fourth, although e-vocational training has made considerable progress as a tool to improve workers employability, it actually shows two major weaknesses: 1) the need to enlist more collectives of workers; and, 2) the need to promote e-vocational training as a lever on structural change in firms (complementary with organizational change and ICT uses).

Business simulations or business games are increasingly used in classrooms around the world. This paper presents some concepts related to the growing use of gamification in the
classroom and proposes a terminology to help ensure their dissemination in a clear manner. The main advantages of the use of serious games in a teaching environment are presented in the results of an investigation that permanently studies the impact of the use of business simulations in the skills of the participants. The main advantages of the use of serious games in an educational environment are the ability to extend and deepen the knowledge acquired by participants through problem solving and decision making in real time, without affecting decisions or any critical key resources, and give more confidence to the participants to make critical decisions in the future. In the coming years, we will see an extension of the process of gamification and the use of simulators in teaching environments.

There is a high consensus in considering regulatory processes of learning as one of the key elements to ensure the knowledge attainment in distance university context, which allows students to periodically evaluate their learning process. In asynchronous learning environments, one of the normal strategies to facilitate this regulation is the use of feedback mechanisms between teacher and students. Though, in an environment with large groups of students, teacher feedback may become a tedious and unsustaianable task.

In this paper, we present the results of three pilot projects centred in the context of the Business degree from UOC, in which we have explored ICT tools (audio, video and screenshots) and differents stretagies to give feedback with the aim of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the regulatory process of learning.

This article explains my final project of the Master in Education and ICT of the UOC (Catalan Open University), which has been prepared following the training program in management projects and organizations with the application of ICT.

The project PIMESCAT 2.0 aims to create a meeting platform for the Catalan SMEs to carry out joint training and conduct ICT training courses for employees of SMEs, which contribute to improve their competitiveness.

This project has been developed following the ADDIE model, as reflected in the structure of the project report, where each phase is explained: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation of the project. In this course I have developed and implemented a sample unit within a Moodle environment, more specifically, unit 7, dedicated to the design and use of blogs. The pedagogical model of this project is based in Learning by doing.