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Referencia:  
 
Mortera, F. J., y Burgos, V. (2010). Innovative Applications Using New Technology: The 
Case of the Knowledge Hub Search Engine and Open Educational Resources 
Building Communities of Practice. Education and Research Technology (ERT) 
Forum (sección 2, Supporting research with new technology and emerging 
technologies). California, EUA. 
 
PAPER TO PRESENT AT THE 
Education and Research Technology (ERT) Forum 
May 26-28, 2010  
California, USA. 
 
Sponsored by  
 University of Southern California 
 
Submitted by (Name): 
 
Fernando J. Mortera-Gutierrez, Ph.D 
Full time Professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Virtual University, Graduate School of 
Education. 
 
J. Vladimir Burgos-Aguilar, MTI, M.Sc 
Educational Innovation Liaison Officer at Innov@TE, Center for Innovation in 
Technology and Education, and part time Professor at the Graduate School of Education 
(EGE) in Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM). 
 
Address: 
Mail Address: 
Eugenio Garza Sada 2501 
64849 Monterrey, N.L., Mexico 
  
Phone: +52/81.8358.2000 ext. 6619 / ext. 6776 
E-Mail: fmortera@itesm.mx, vburgos@itesm.mx 
 
*ERT Forum Themes: 2.Supporting research with new technology and emerging 
technologies 
 
*Presentation Title:  
Innovative Applications Using New Technology: The Case of the Knowledge Hub 
Search Engine and Open Educational Resources Building Communities of Practice. 
 
*Abstract:  
The movement of Open Educational Resources (OER) is one of the 
most important trends that are helping education through the Internet 
worldwide, and it’s a term that is being adopted every day in many 
educational institutions.“Tecnológico de Monterrey” in Mexico has 
proposed and developed an important educational initiative, named: 
“Knowledge Hub” (KHUB). The initiative is conceived by the faculty’s 
needs to find effective materials in teaching and learning and with the 
certainty that the resources found respects intellectual property and 
legal rights from their original authors. It is a public catalog that 
provides a multilingual search engine that allows the user to discover 
selected Open Educational Resources (OER) using metadata enriched 
by experts and enhanced by librarians, using Web 2.0 such faceted 
searching and social networking tools. The KHUB is for free use 
available on the Internet for teachers, professors and self-learners of all 
levels, from higher education to K12 (http://khub.itesm.mx/). This 
paper presents experiences on a project about innovative applications 
and the use of new technologies using OER which allowed building 
communities of practice among Mexican educational institutions during 
year 2009. The “Knowledge Hub for K12 Education Project” was 
funded by the Corporación de Universidades para el Desarrollo del 
Internet (CUDI) and by the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología 
(CONACYT) of Mexico and hosted by the Tecnológico de Monterrey, 
in Mexico. The main goal of this project was to generate and enrich a 
catalog of Open Educational Resources for basic or elementary 
education (K12) for Mexico and Spanishspeaking countries in Latin 
America, and the rest of the world; within the field of innovative 
education and technology, through the work and community of practice 
of K12 teachers and university faculty participants. Other goals of this 
project were to improve educational processes, faculty development, 
reduce educational gap, and to foster equity access of educational 
resources at K12 level. Six Mexican higher education institutions 
(universities and colleges) participated in this project, and this paper 
presentation will talk about their faculty experiences on how was build 
a community of practice to use innovative applications and new 
technologies. Also, this paper describes how Open Educational 
Resources (OER) were used in the K12 educational level through the 
"Knowledge Hub", the academic search engine developed by 
Tecnológico de Monterrey to help teachers in the design and instruction 
of their courses. The paper will comment and describe, also, how KHub 
has been working and its characteristics. 
 
Introduction 
 
The movement of Open Educational Resources (OER) is one of the most important 
trends that are helping education through the Internet worldwide, and it’s a term that is 
being adopted every day in many educational institutions, from Higher Education to K12; 
especially those which have embraced distance education (e-learning) and information 
and communication technologies (ICT) as one of their major institutional and teaching 
efforts, such as "Tecnológico de Monterrey" (ITESM)  has done in Mexico. Tecnológico 
de Monterrey is a private, non-profit academic institution with 65 years of experience. It 
is composed of 33 campuses across Mexico that offer high-school programs, 
undergraduate and graduate degrees, continuing education, as well as social programs.  
Through technology-based distance programs, Tecnologico de Monterrey is a pioneer in 
distance education with more of 20 years of experience through its Virtual University, 
reaching 29 countries; at present time, the Virtual University offers totally online 
undergraduate, postgraduate, continuing education, and social programs 
 
Tecnológico de Monterrey is one of the most competitive private higher education 
institutions in Mexico, has implemented for more than 20 years videoconferencing, TV 
satellite and online instruction to deliver distance education courses and programs, and 
also more than 10 years using different e-learning platforms (LearningSpace, 
BlackBoard, FirstClass, BSCW, WebTec) to enhance its traditional face-to-face and 
distance education programs at undergraduate and graduate level (Master and Doctoral 
programs). Through these e-learning electronic delivery educational platforms 
Tecnológico de Monterrey has reached all its 33 campuses around Mexico. Blackboard is 
its major e-learning platform, and it is widely used both locally (each campus has certain 
autonomy in its use) and through its Virtual University.  
Tecnológico de Monterrey has worked in the past two years in several projects on 
the reuse of royalty free course materials from Carnegie Mellon University, Yale 
University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the objective of 
identifying key critical factors to develop a model to effectively transfer OER. 
Capitalizing theses experiences, Tecnológico de Monterrey proposed the creation of and 
important educational initiative, named “Knowledge Hub” (KHUB) at the World 
Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2008 during a Global 
Universities Leaders Forum session (CNN, 2008). 
Knowledge Hub is a public catalog that provides a multilingual search engine that 
allows the user to discover selected Open Educational Resources (OER) using metadata 
enriched by experts and enhanced by librarians, using Web 2.0 such faceted searching 
and social networking tools. The KHUB is for free use available on the Internet for 
teachers, professors and self-learners of all levels, from higher education to K12 
(http://khub.itesm.mx/). It was created to assist teachers in the task of introducing 
innovations in the classroom which will improve the teaching-learning process, and by 
consequence, student retention, motivation and attention. 
 
The main idea of KHUB is to have a unique index of open educational resources 
(include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, 
software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to 
knowledge) available on the Internet to help students and teachers. KHUB objective is to 
assist professors and students in finding the educational resource that best suits their 
needs. To achieve this objective, KHUB uses metadata defined by experts, as well as 
specialized searching and social networking tools for sharing comments and rankings on 
the OER. 
The Knowledge Hub it’s a Mexican distance education initiative of the 
Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM) to the world. This initiative puts together the effort 
of both faculty and administrative staff of all its undergraduate and graduate programs to 
create a website and academic search engine on the Internet and the World Wide Web, to 
offer indexed open educational resources (OER). These open educational resources are 
indexed and classified following a quality assurance process. “At the heart of the 
movement toward Open Educational Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the 
world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the World Wide 
Web in particular provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and 
reuse knowledge. OER are the parts of that knowledge that comprise the fundamental 
components of educational content and tools for teaching, learning, and research” 
(Atkins, Brown, and Hammond, 2007, p. 6). 
 
 
Knowledge Hub and Open Educational Resources for K12 Project Experience: 
Community of Practice 
 
In the “Knowledge Hub for K12 Education Project” that was funded by the Corporación 
de Universidades para el Desarrollo del Internet (CUDI) and by the Consejo Nacional 
de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) of Mexico and hosted by the Tecnológico de 
Monterrey, in Mexico in 2009. Six higher education institutions were involved: 
Tecnológico de Monterrey (with 5 professors and 5 researchers), Universidad 
Regiomontana (with 2 professors), Comité Regional Norte de la Comisión Mexicana de 
Cooperación con la UNESCO, AC (with 3 researchers), Universidad de Montemorelos 
(with 4 professors), Instituto de Investigación, Innovación y Estudios de Posgrado para 
Educación, IIIEPE (with 3 researchers) and Escuela Normal Miguel F. Martínez (with 5 
teachers). 
 
The group of 11 professors, 5 teachers and 8 researchers agreed to work virtually and 
locally with traditional face-to-face meetings using several communication mechanisms: 
 
 A webpage (Blog) to centralize efforts of communication and documentation 
process (http://khubk12.blogspot.com) 
 Web discussion forums to debate, argue and agree about several topics 
 Electronic mail (email)  
 Videoconference (Internet 2) 
 Chat and web-conference 
 Face-to-face local meetings 
 
Also, the group agreed to have several training sessions through videoconference and 
recorded sessions through DVDs and power point slides. The training's sessions have had 
the objective to develop new skills and abilities about the use of web technology and 
information literacy. Also, the training sessions addressed the awareness about Open 
Educational Resources (OER) and the clarification about the use of resources and 
materials for teaching and learning purposes in the classroom. 
 
In the group were identified access barriers for the use of Open Educational Resources 
(OER) in Mexico by teachers in K12 schools, such as technological infrastructure (lack 
of internet access, projectors and computers), legal issues (access of the resources in 
terms of licensing), relevance about the content of the materials available on the Internet 
(resources mainly from other countries), lack of resources in Spanish (language issues), 
computer literacy gap in K12 schools and lack of awareness in the institutional level (lack 
of information in managerial levels). 
 
The group coordinated 150 teachers in 20 schools using OER in basic education 
programs for learning and teaching in the classroom. The experiences were documented 
in the webpage (Blog) and critical topics were resolved in the discussion forums. 
 
References: 
 
Atkins, D., Brown, J.S., & Hammond, A. L. (2007). A review of the open educational 
resources (OER) movement: Achievements, challenges, and new opportunities.  San 
Francisco, CA: The Willian and Flora Hewlett Foundation. 
Ávila, H.,  & Sanabria, D. (2008). El Proyecto knowledge hub: De México hacia el resto 
del mundo. Memorias del III Encuentro de Catalogación y Metadatos.  CUIB, 
Centro Universitario de Investigaciones Bibliotecológicas de la UNAM y el 
Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, http://cuib.unam.mx/iiiecm/IIIECM.pdf 
(p.6). 
Burgos Aguilar, J. V. (2008). Knowledge Hub Open Educational Resources (OER) 
index: experiences of Tecnológico de Monterrey; OER stories/Knowledge Hub, 
UNESCO OER Community Open Educational Resources“. June 2008. Retrieved 
from http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=OER_stories/Knowledge_Hub 
Burgos Aguilar, J. V. (2008a). Knowledge hub: Open educational resources (OER) 
index, experiences of Tecnológico de Monterrey. Monterrey, Nuevo León, México: 
Fotocopia (sin publicar). Tecnológico de Monterrey. 
CNN. (2008). El Tec diseña un 'Google' académico, Article published at CNN 
Expansión.com, by Verónica Galán, 16-april-2008 and retrieved at October 10, 
2008, from http://www.cnnexpansion.com/tecnologia/2008/04/16/tec-de-
monterrey-elabora-buscador 
D´Antoni, S. (2007). Open educational resources, the way forward: Deliberations of an 
international community of interest. San Francisco, CA: UNESCO. 
Fountain, R., & Mortera, F. (2007). Rethinking distance education in North America: 
Canadian and Mexican perspectives on open access and online learning. Quebec 
City, Canada: 11
th
 Norh American Higher Education Conference (CONAHEC). 
Haßler, Bjöern (2009). Access to Open Educational Resources, Report of a UNESCO 
OER Community Discussion, International Community of OER 
(http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org); (9-27 February, 2009); http://oerwiki.iiep-
unesco.org/index.php?title=Access2OER/Contents 
KHUB. (2008). Knowledge Hub: Open Educational Resources (OER) Index. Recupeardo 
el 10 de octubre de 2008, disponible en-línea http://khub.itesm.mx/ 
Mortera, F., & Escamilla, J. (2009). La Iniciativa Knowledge Hub como un Índice de 
Recursos Educativos Abiertos, sus Características Tecnológicas, y su Relación con 
la Educación a Distancia. . Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia 
(RIED) 12(1) pp. 83-112. Universidad de Loja, Madrid, España.  ISSN: 1390-3306.   
http: www.utpl.edu.ec/ried. 


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