NATIONAL/REGIONAL NETWORKS

RUEPEC - Spanish Universities Continuing Education Network (Red Universitaria de Estudios de Postgrado y Educación Continua)

Contact details:

Juan Carlos Rodriguez
RUEPEC
c/o. Unviersidad Carlos III de Madrid
Edificio Lopez Aranguren, despacho 15.1.35
Madrid 126
28903 Getafe
SPAIN

Tel. +34 91 6249759
http://www.ruepec.org/

The 16th , 2001 when, before the 21st EUCEN conference, we celebrated the first meeting of Continuing Education Directors from 32 Spanish universities.

In that encounter we talked about different types of organization, strategies, and the wide range of programs we offer. We noticed, however, that there weren't any Spanish university nets which would allow us to exchange continuing education experiences.

The main conclusion was that there was a high level of interest in continuing to promote contact between all the Spanish universities, not only for academic subjects but also in the different ways of organizing a continuing education center.

In that meeting an executive committee was created with 9 members. These members represent universities from all the regions of Spain as well as different kinds of organizations. The most important mission was to create a Spanish Universities Continuing Education Net and to back it up.

The first year, the efforts of the committee resulted in the 1st conference of the net. The conference took place in Valencia and was attended by 48 people representing 36 Spanish universities.

The second year the net's website began to operate exchanging information, initiatives, benchmarking, collaboration projects, and so on.

The 2nd Conference was held in Granada in 2003, in February of 2004 took place the 3rd Conference in Santander and the 4rd in Madrid, all of them with a great success and now we are 73 Spanish universities.

The main goal of our net is to promote the contact of Spanish universities in the specific area of continuing education in order to:

• Exchange experiences.
• Improve the knowledge of our sector and environment.
• Back collaboration in learning together.
• Promote academic and managerial collaboration.
• Stay in contact with international and national nets and promote the participation of the Spanish universities in those nets.
• Establish criteria for finding a common position.