Autores/as:
Medina-Flores, Ruth and Morales-Gamboa, Rafael
Resumen:
We developed a proposal of a usability evaluation by the experts of a learning management system (LMS). The instrument is designed on the basis of the general criteria for the heuristic evaluation proposed by Nielsen, as well as on international standards, guides, and recommendations for software quality (ISO 9241 and ISO 9126). We present the results from applying the usability evaluation instrument to Metacampus, an LMS developed by and used at the Virtual University System, University of Guadalajara.
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Autores/as:
Raabe, André Luís Alice and da Costa, Agnaldo and Vieira, Marli Fátima Vick
Resumen:
The task of choosing an authoring tool for creating digital instructional materials is becoming complex, since the amount of possibilities is daily increasing. In this sense, this paper presents the development and the evaluation of an authoring tool taxonomy made in compliance with the ANSI/NISO Z39.19 international standard. The taxonomy was classified over 400 tools and was published on a Web site. It was evaluated by 135 professionals of distance learning communities through a questionnaire. The results showed the validity and the usefulness of the taxonomy and pointed out the pertinence of the classification strategy.
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Autores/as:
Tovar, Edmundo and Castro, Manuel
Resumen:
This editorial introduces the first selection of papers in IEEE-RITA from the FIE annual conference held in 2014. It publishes an overview of the FIE coverage of issues and topics inside their engineering coverage of Latin American countries, and of the solutions and vision they provide worldwide and for the Region.
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Autores/as:
Gordillo, Aldo and Barra, Enrique and Quemada, Juan
Resumen:
Quizzes are among the most widely used resources in Web-based education due to their many benefits. However, educators need suitable authoring tools that can be used to create reusable quizzes and to enhance existing materials with them. This paper presents an online e-Learning authoring tool for creating and integrating reusable quizzes and enhancing existing learning resources with them. The evaluation of this authoring tool showed that teachers found it useful and easy to use. A total of 246 educational resources created with the tool were evaluated, and the results were analyzed, showing that the resources that included quizzes had higher quality and that the resources that had higher quality were more likely to contain quizzes. These findings are the main contribution of this paper, and they show that educators can enhance existing learning resources by adding assessment resources if suitable authoring tools are provided. Finally, the different factors that assure the reusability of the created quizzes and resources are also exposed.
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Autores/as:
Orduña, Pablo and Zutin, Danilo Garbi and Govaerts, Sten and Zorrozua, Irene Lequerica and Bailey, Philip H. and Sancristobal, Elio and Salzmann, Christophe and Rodriguez-Gil, Luis and DeLong, Kimberly and Gillet, Denis and Castro, Manuel and López-de-Ipi
Resumen:
Remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real equipment located in universities. The integration of remote laboratories in learning tools (learning management systems, content management systems, or personal learning environments) has been achieved to integrate remote laboratories as part of the learning curricula. A cross-institutional initiative called gateway4labs has been created to perform this integration extensible to multiple remote laboratories in multiple learning tools. This contribution focuses on describing this initiative and, in particular, how opening it to public systems (where users do not need to be registered) produces new technical and organizational challenges due to the public availability of labs. In addition, this contribution shows integrations of systems that were not previously addressed in this initiative, such as PhET or ViSH, as well as a new approach for integrating supported laboratories in external specifications such as the smart device one through OpenSocial.
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Autores/as:
Filho, Nemésio Freitas Duarte and Barbosa, Ellen Francine
Resumen:
The development and the use of learning environments, coupled with the evolution of mobile computing, have contributed significantly to the establishment of a new learning modality known as mobile learning (m-learning). In this new scenario, the educational environments, despite having many benefits and facilities with regard to teaching and learning, have problems and challenges that need to be addressed. One of the important aspects to be investigated concerns the establishment and adoption of architectural patterns. In fact, most of these environments are built in an isolated form, having their own architectures and structures, which may negatively impact the ability of standardization and support of architectural definition. The main goal of this paper is to investigate and define a service-oriented reference architecture for m-learning environments. The proposed architecture, named Ref-mLearning, aims to contribute to the evolution, reuse, and interoperability of such environments, enabling an increase in quality and cost reduction during their development, due to the use of features provided by service-oriented architecture. Ref-mLearning was also evaluated through qualitative and quantitative aspects: 1) in comparison with a reference architecture model and 2) with the support of specialists. The results showed that the proposed architecture comprises relevant elements with respect to a service-oriented reference architecture.
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Autores/as:
Conde, Miguel Á. and García-Peñalvo, Francisco J. and Gómez-Aguilar, Diego-Alonso and Therón, Roberto
Resumen:
The application of the information and communication technologies to teaching and learning processes is linked to the development of new tools and services that can help students and teachers. Learning platforms are a clear example of this. They are very popular tools in eLearning contexts and provide different types of learning applications and services. In addition, these environments also register most of the interactions between the learning process stakeholders and the system. This information could potentially be used to make decisions, but usually it is stored as raw data, which is very difficult to understand. This paper presents a system that employs visual learning analytic techniques to facilitate the exploitation of that information. The system presented includes several tools that make possible to explore issues, such as when interaction is carried out, which contents are the most important for users, and how they interact with others. The system was tested in the context of a software engineering subject, considering the stored logs of five academic years. From this analysis, it is possible to see how visual analytics can help decision-making, and in this context, how it helps to improve educational processes.
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Autores/as:
Serrano-Laguna, Ángel and Torrente, Javier and Iglesias, Borja Manero and Fernández-Manjón, Baltasar
Resumen:
Every day, more people are interested in learning computer science (CS), either to improve their skill set to apply for new jobs or just for personal growth. The sector of the population looking for instruction on these subjects has increased and diversified. We need new tools that appeal to this wider audience, and game-based learning is one of the most promising approaches at the moment. There is a need for more scalable game-based instruction paradigms that can be easily adapted to different levels of complexity and content related to CS (different programming languages, different programming paradigms, and so on). Throughout this paper, we present a flexible and scalable architecture to create videogames for learning CS languages. The architecture is based on the idea that students control the game using small pieces of text written in some CS language. The keys of the scalability of our approach are: 1) it separates the CS language used to write the programs from the game design and 2) the game model provides a system of levels that allows incremental learning of CS language structures. As validation and implementation of our approach, we developed Lost in Space, an educational videogame to teach the XML markup language. In this game, the player travels through several levels, guiding a spaceship by introducing small pieces of XML in a text console. Players can move and rotate the ship among other power-ups that get unblocked as they advances in the game. The game was tested with undergraduate students from CS and social sciences, by comparing it with traditional instruction (i.e., a teacher with a slides presentation). Students who played the game were much more engaged than those who attended the lecture, showing a more active attitude throughout the whole experience and also spent more time practicing after class. Findings also suggest that the game was effective for instruction, regardless of the background of the students. However, the educational gain observed with the game-based instructional approach, although effective, was not significantly higher than traditional instruction. We think that our approach is adequate to introduce CS languages in general, as well as new programming languages, and seems to be more appealing to new comers than traditional instruction.
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Autores/as:
Lopez-Vargas, Jorge and Piedra, Nelson and Chicaiza, Janneth and Tovar, Edmundo
Resumen:
In these days, much of the information published on the Web is published on social media, represented through social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, to name only the most prominent. Each of the media and social networks has its own scheme of operation and different working characteristics; for example, Twitter is a social network where millions of daily messages called tweets are exchanged. The message labels, called hashtags, can be used to identify the subject of the message. The message may also include links to other resources that expand the original content or show interesting information. Another kind of information present in Twitter is the relationship between users, the most common of which is a non-reciprocal relationship named “following.” The scope of this paper is to use the information that is published on Twitter to extract and recommend open educational resources, which will be used in the StartUp project. The StartUp project (intelligent training needs assessment and open educational resources to foster entrepreneurship) is co-funded with support from the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme, which has a specific objective to provide effective open educational resources corresponding to individual learning needs. The extraction of information posted on social networks is solved in this paper through the use of linked data that allow retrieving resources and link them with other external sources, graphs that help represent the working scheme of a social network, and with social network analysis, a technique used to discover relevant information that goes beyond individual properties. The results obtained are a set of recommendations about users (identified as experts), hashtags (thematically related), and URLs (digital resources), according to the main competence areas defined by StartUp. This information will form part of the learning paths provided by the project platform.
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Autores/as:
Tawfik, Mohamed and Lowe, David and Salzmann, Christophe and Gillet, Denis and Sancristobal, Elio and Castro, Manuel
Resumen:
In the last decade, we have witnessed a significant proliferation of remote laboratories, unconstrained by temporal or geographical considerations, in all fields of engineering education, thanks to the exponential revolution of digital technologies and computers. In response to these needs, this paper provides a literature review on the commonly encountered hardware and software implementation issues nowadays. It provides a generic model for developing and implementing modern remote laboratories suited for a wide spectrum of application categories and for the next-generation educational systems. This paper addresses all the components and stages of the architectural design, outlining the critical factors to be considered in each of them. The overall goal is to provide guidelines for developers, either providers or consumers, and to facilitate remote laboratories development, implementation, and sharing across universities-seamlessly and efficiently.
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