UC wins the 2021 edition of the Portugal Digital Awards

The online academic platform of the University of Coimbra - UC Teacher, was distinguished as the Best Education Project. These prizes are a joint initiative of IDC Portugal and Axians, which awards the best digital transformation projects and practices of national organisations.

The UC Teacher project is an online academic platform that, together with the Nonio academic system, provides virtual rooms by course/class to hold synchronous classes, dematerialises class summaries and attendance management. It also offers various tools for student support, including access to support materials, recorded content, discussion groups, closed video rooms and automated translation.

It was launched in September 2020, at the beginning of the 2020/21 academic year, with versions for teachers (UC Teacher) and students (UC Student), and designed to be compatible with a PC, tablet or mobile phone. This platform was a response to the need to digitise processes brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, allowing for greater proximity between faculty and students. In one year, it recorded around 40,000 virtual classes and meetings, involving 30,000 active users and generating 400 TB ("terabytes") of audiovisual traffic.

"This award is the recognition of a great effort on the part of the University of Coimbra, which was able to find innovative solutions in adverse circumstances. We managed to turn hardship into opportunity and, as I have already said, UC Teacher is much more than a tool to deal with the difficulties arising from the current pandemic: it is a qualitative leap in the process of digitizing the UC, which will remain for the future", says the Rector of the University of Coimbra, Amílcar Falcão.