Authors:
Baldini, Patricia N. and Calandrini, Guillermo L. and Doñate, Pedro D. and Bambill, Héctor R.
Abstract:
This paper presents an educational experience in an initial course in feedback control. The purpose is to introduce the concepts of robust design not included in the regular curriculum. The problem of designing a controller for a simple mechanical system without knowing the true value of the parameters is proposed in a laboratory class. The task is performed on the real system with the aid of Computer-Aided Design freeware. The combination of practice and software tools encourages the development of autonomous learning and favours the apprehension of the concepts of uncertainty and robustness. A perception survey shows promising results indicating that the strategy of learning by doing is very well accepted by the students.
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Authors:
Bachiller Martín, Carmen and Alberto Conejero, J.
Abstract:
The study of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics has suffered a strong decrease during the last decade in western countries. The causes of this decrease are very diverse, but it seems necessary to take actions to improve the perception that the future students have about these studies and to approach technology to high school classrooms. Telecochips are a pool of activities designed for promoting the engagement of high school students for telecommunications and electronic engineering in the Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain).
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Authors:
Casali, Ana and Cechinel, Cristian and Ochoa, Xavier
Abstract:
The present editorial introduces a special issue of the IEEE-RITA journal devoted to Strategies to Improve the Usability of Learning Object Repositories (LORs). This special issue is sponsored by the Ibero-American Program of Science and Technology for Development (CYTED) under the scope of the RIURE network (Ibero-American Network for Usability Educational Repositories) code 513RT0471. This editorial briefly introduces some of the main usability problems we encounter in LORs nowadays and summarizes the subjects tackled by the selected articles.
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Authors:
Rodés-Paragarino, Virginia and Gewerc-Barujel, Adriana and Llamas-Nistal, Martín
Abstract:
Repositories of digital educational resources have reached a significant level of development and diversification in the last decade to the point of becoming a component in higher education transformation. This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of the studies about the use and adoption of repositories of digital educational resources. Some quantitative approaches mainly collect metrics related to the publishing and reuse of educational resources. However, there is still insufficient empirical evidence to account for the types of adoption and use of educational repositories. There are few studies aimed at determining which are the dimensions of adoption of educational resources repositories by scholars, how the adoption of educational repositories overlaps in teaching practices, and which subjective, contextual, institutional, curricular, and instructional factors are involved in the different types of use.
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Authors:
Maldonado Mahauad, Jorge Javier and Carvallo, Juan Pablo and Siguencia Zambrano, Josefina
Abstract:
Educational repositories of digital educational material and learning objects allow teachers and students to store and retrieve educational resources to be used in virtual teaching and learning environments as well as in face-to-face educational spaces. They are also an important means of disseminating and evaluating the quality of educational resources produced by teachers. The quality of these resources largely relies on the guidelines and policies issued by educational institutions and supplied to their teachers, so that these resources can be created with an adequate level of quality and deployed in different learning management systems. The objective of this paper is to explore to what extent Ecuadorian universities make use of the educational repositories of digital educational material, the specialized repositories of learning objects, and the way in which they have evolved over the last five years. This paper also helps to identify the barriers and the factors that hinder their use. It is expected that the conclusions drawn from this analysis will permit the design of strategies aimed to promote the creation and use of quality digital educational materials.
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Authors:
Casali, Ana and Deco, Claudia and Beltramone, Santiago
Abstract:
This paper presents an assistant to populate institutional repositories. This tool can detect all educational digital objects in a text format that are already published on institutional Websites and can be uploaded to a repository. This recopilation is a tedious task and is usually performed manually. In this paper, we propose a system architecture for automating this task of collecting text documents within a restricted domain in order to detect plausible documents that can be loaded into a repository. In addition, its metadata, such as language, category, title, authors, and their contact data, is automatically extracted. A prototype of this system was developed, and case studies in two different domains are analyzed.
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Authors:
Freire, Manuel and Fernández-Manjón, Baltasar
Abstract:
In this paper, we describe the special challenges that educational games (also known as serious games) pose for online learning object (LO) repositories. As in all metadata, a tension exists between descriptive power and the effort needed to create these descriptions. This tension is even greater when describing complex, highly interactive multimedia content such as serious games. We consider serious games as LOs, proposing game-specific metadata, and advocate for game authoring tool support that streamlines its creation.
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Authors:
Méndez, Nestor D. Duque and Morales, Valentina Tabares and Vicari, Rosa M.
Abstract:
One of the topics that generate interest in the community is the possibility of relating the characteristics of students with the type of material that best suits the student's learning style, interests, and preferences. This topic holds most importance in systems that perform automatic selection of materials and educational activities and thus improve usability. The main idea of this paper is directed to the personalized selection of learning objects according to the student learning style. The proposal and some of the tests that predict good outcomes in diverse systems are presented.
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Authors:
Caeiro-Rodríguez, Manuel and Rodríguez-Bermúdez, Melisa and Llamas-Nistal, Martín and Santos-Gago, Juan Manuel
Abstract:
This paper introduces the first implementation of relevance and reputation indicators in Edu-AREA. This Web 2.0 application promotes users creating, viewing, adopting, adapting, and curating elements in an open way, following the principles of the open educational resources movement. A main issue is the management and control of quality. Users can provide elements freely, so some mechanism that can estimate or rank their quality is needed. A solution based on usage by other users inspired in the hypertext-induced topic search algorithm is adopted. Taking into account the usages of the elements, a relevance measure for each element and a reputation measure for each user are calculated.
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Authors:
Martín-Moncunill, David and Gaona-García, Paulo Alonso and García-Barriocanal, Elena and Sánchez-Alonso, Salvador
Abstract:
Difficulties in finding learning objects (LOs) in LO repositories (LORs) are one of the main barriers, which prevent LORs from being globally adopted. During the Organic.Edunet European research project, different search interfaces were developed with the intention of facilitating the location of LOs, considering users would tend to use different interfaces, according to the objectives and specific search context. This paper resumes the results of a usability study carried out in Organic.Edunet portal, where users were asked to complete different search tasks that were clearly oriented to the use of one of the existing interfaces, and provides a snapshot about how this knowledge was transferred to Organic.Lingua project.
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