Herramienta Audio Visual Sobre Tecnología IP (AVIP) para Alcanzar Estándares de Calidad

— Online (virtual) courses, consisting of essentially textual materials, discussion forums, limited (auto)evaluation, etc., have represented the state of the art in eLearning for some time. Recent technological innovation in the UNED (the only national public distance university in Spain) has enabled to go beyond the concept of " virtual courses " (implicit in eLearning) to give rise to a new term: " virtual attendance " , whereby the transactional distance present in eLearning is greatly reduced by application of specialized ICT which permits the same types of interaction in distance learning context that are possible in traditional face-to-face learning scenarios. This is achieved by the integration of synchronous communication and learning resource generation and management capabilities into UNED's open source educational platform. In this article, the ICT architecture underling virtual attendance, namely AVIP (Audio Video over IP) tool, is described along with designing rules, implantation plan and pilot experiences. The tool combines high end video-conferencing with low end web-conferencing, together with smart board-based learning resource manipulation and digital content repositories in a way that allows virtual attendance to be used within the European Higher Education Space in a blended learning environment.