Currently, María is a Spanish Permanent Professor at the Law Faculty of the UNED –Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia/National University of Distance Education), in the Civil Law Department. She obtained the Doctor of Law degree from the Carlos III de Madrid University, Social and Legal Sciences Faculty, on 29 September 1992. She stayed as Visiting Professor at the Centre de Droit Prive Fondamental of the Robert Schuman University, in Strasbourg (France), for two academic years (2002-2004). Since October 2004 María worked as a Seconded National Expert at the European Commission (DG JLS – Civil Justice and Fundamental Rights Directorate, Unit C-1), in Brussels (Belgium); her secondment finished in October 2008. In December 2008 she returned to her previous position at the UNED.
As a University Professor she has devoted her entire professional career to research, teaching, writing, lecturing and those other activities inherent to that. Her C.V. attests that she is dedicated to go deeply into the study of Civil law at both national and European levels. It witnesses however that she has also concerned herself with other aspects related to the educational process, such as the methodology for a better transmission of knowledge. That is the reason why some of her research work focused on “alternative” teaching methods; besides, the University at which she is a Permanent Professor provides an appropriate environment to put such methods in practice and she is a membership of the Empower-Institutional Support: media and educational support field-European Association of Distance Teaching and Learning (EADTU) since 2014, where she has attended the Acción webinar on “Listening the educational initiatives for Migrants and Refugees coming from NGOs” (15 May 2017).
Since she took on her position as Permanent Professor of the Civil Law Department at the Faculty of Law of the UNED in 1996, she applied herself to materialize all the experience. Maria had already acquired in the lecture room and started to work in the area of distance-learning methods. Thus, she created “Legal Games”, a publication in which games are used as a mean to facilitate the study of law, in comparison with the rigid learning schemes traditionally applied in this field. She paid attention to T.V and radio programmes since she considered them to be key elements of the distance-learning methodology. María also produced and coordinated “CANVAS-Derechos reales e Inmobiliario Registral”/CANVAS-Real States and Registry law that is a subject of Law Degree. It is a pilot project developed at the UNED in 2018 to explore and coordinate the production of a EEB in a law subject, which combines all available Open Educational Resources (OERs) and additional functionalities, thus providing a comprehensive, versatile, customized, easy to update and all in one learning and teaching method. The pilot-project for learning and teaching online with both, CANVAS and Scenario mythologies of study and learning, was presented in Annual Conference OOFHEC2019 de EADTU that took place on 16-18 October 2019 in la UNED-Madrid (ES), with the titled: "Blended and online education within European university networks", Spain 16-18 October 2019, in the seminar 'Connecting educational resources to "all in one" distance learning and teaching: the CANVAS pilot project'. Currently, they are ongoing to work for improving it.
