Search

One important problem in MOOCs is the lack of personalized support from teachers. Conversational agents arise as one possible solution to assist MOOC learners and help them to study. For example, conversational agents can help review key concepts of the MOOC by asking questions to the learners and providing examples. JavaPAL, a voice-based conversational agent for supporting learners on a MOOC on programming with Java offered on edX. This paper evaluates JavaPAL from different perspectives. First, the usability of JavaPAL is analyzed, obtaining a score of 74.41 according to a System Usability Scale (SUS). Second, learners’ performance is compared when answering questions directly through JavaPAL and through the equivalent web interface on edX, getting similar results in terms of performance. Finally, interviews with JavaPAL users reveal that this conversational agent can be helpful as a complementary tool for the MOOC due to its portability and flexibility compared to accessing the MOOC contents through the web interface. This work was supported in part by the FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades-Agencia Estatal de Investigación, through the Smartlet and H2O Learning projects under Grant TIN2017-85179-C3-1-R and PID2020-112584RB-C31, and in part by the Madrid Regional Government through the e-Madrid-CM Project under Grant S2018/TCS-4307 and under the Multiannual Agreement with UC3M in the line of Excellence of University Professors (EPUC3M21), and in the context of the V PRICIT (Regional Programme of Research and Technological Innovation), a project which is co-funded by the European Structural Funds (FSE and FEDER). Partial support has also been received from the European Commission through Erasmus+ Capacity Building in the Field of Higher Education projects, more specifically through projects LALA, InnovaT, and PROF-XXI (586120-EPP-1-2017-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP), (598758-EPP-1-2018-1-AT-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP), (609767-EPP-1-2019-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP). This publication reflects the views only of the authors and funders cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

iLRN 2017 Coimbra!

The Universidad Carlos III de Madrid has been offering several face-to-face remedial courses for new students to review or learn concepts and practical skills that they should know before starting their degree program. During 2012 and 2013, our University adopted MOOC-like technologies to support some of these courses so that a blended learning methodology could be applied in a particular educational context, i.e. by using SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses). This paper gathers a list of issues, challenges and solutions when implementing these SPOCs. Based on these challenges and issues, a design process is proposed for the implementation of SPOCs. In addition, an evaluation is presented of the different use of the offered courses based on indicators such as the number of videos accessed, number of exercises accessed, number of videos completed, number of exercises correctly solved or time spent on the platform. pub

In our rapidly changing world it is increasingly important not only to be an expert in a chosen field of study but also to be able to respond to developments, master new approaches to solving problems, and fulfil changing requirements in the modern world and in the job market. In response to these needs key competencies in understanding, developing and using new digital technologies are being brought into focus in school and university programmes. The IFIP TC3 conference "KEYCIT – Key Competences in Informatics and ICT (KEYCIT 2014)" was held at the University of Potsdam in Germany from July 1st to 4th, 2014 and addressed the combination of key competencies, Informatics and ICT in detail. The conference was organized into strands focusing on secondary education, university education and teacher education (organized by IFIP WGs 3.1 and 3.3) and provided a forum to present and to discuss research, case studies, positions, and national perspectives in this field.

Today’s technology enhanced learning scenarios focus on outcome-oriented delivery of learning processes, contents, and services. Also, learners increasingly demand for innovative and motivating learning scenarios that match their habits of using media. The European project ICOPER researches outcome-oriented learning infrastructures for higher education contexts. The German BMBF-project SpITKom aims at transferring such approaches to basic qualification. Based on a Browser Game, it uses ICOPER’s technical infrastructure which combines learning object metadata repositories, learning outcome repositories, learning design repositories and learner profile repositories. This paper initially depicts the technical infrastructure of an outcome-oriented learning scenario that was developed in the course of ICOPER and then outlines its transformation to the game-based learning approach as realized in the course of SpITKom.

The adoption of mobile devices and context-aware technologies offers the opportunity of designing educational mobile-based games across multiple spaces that enrich the learners’ experience. But producing these games is challenging from both the authoring and technical points of view. This paper proposes a framework to facilitate the design of these games. The framework consists of two elements: (1) a narrative structure, and (2) a platform for its deployment. Both elements defined as a set of templates to be completed for facilitating both the authoring of the narrative and the design of the platform. In order to show a usage example, the framework has been used to develop a mobile-based game for a museum. The game designed has been piloted with 10 students between 6 and 12 years old. The results of the pilot show that it is technically feasible to use this framework to design a mobile-base game across three spaces: a museum, home and a classroom. The students found the activity a good and engaging learning experience. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Proceedings of: 2013 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) 13-15 March 2013, Berlin (Germany). Feedback is important for any activity, and learning is no exception. Whereas assessment can give summative feedback about the proficiency of the learning, learning analytics can give a much finer level of feedback about the learning process. Learning analytics can help in identifying the effectiveness of learning elements, can help in engaging students, can guide teachers in the preparation and deployment of the teaching activity. In this paper, we present a number of different initiatives carried out at UC3M that include elements of learning analytics for different purposes. The eMadrid Excellence Network is being funded by the Madrid Regional Government (Comunidad de Madrid) with grant No. S2009/TIC-1650. We wish to acknowledge stimulating discussions with our partners in the context of the network. Partial support has also been received from the EEE project (TIN2011-28308-C03-01).

One of the challenges of intelligent systems for education is to use low-level data collected in computer environments in the form of events or interactions to infer information with high-level significance using artificial intelligence techniques, and present it through visualizations in a meaningful and effective way. Among this information, emotional data is gaining track in by instructors in their educational activities. Many benefits can be obtained if an intelligent systems can bring teachers with knowledge about their learner's emotions, learning causes, and learning relationships with emotions. In this paper, we propose and justify a set of visualizations for an intelligent system to provide awareness about the emotions of the learners to the instructor based on the learners' interactions in their computers. We apply these learner's affective visualizations in a programming course at University level with more than 300 students, and analyze and interpret the student's emotional results in connection with the learning process. Work partially funded by the EEE project, ‘‘Plan Nacional de I+D+I TIN2011-28308-C03-01’’ and the ‘‘Emadrid: Investigación y desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid’’ project (S2009/TIC-1650)’’.

The growth in the range of disciplines that Virtual Worlds support for educational purposes is evidenced by recent applications in the fields of cultural heritage, humanitarian aid, space exploration, virtual laboratories in the physical sciences, archaeology, computer science and coastal geography. This growth is due in part to the flexibility of OpenSim, the open source virtual world platform which by adopting Second Life protocols and norms has created a de facto standard for open virtual worlds that is supported by a growing number of third party open source viewers. Yet while this diversity of use-cases is impressive and Virtual Worlds for open learning are highly popular with lecturers and learners alike immersive education remains an essentially niche activity. This paper identifies functional challenges in terms of Management, Network Infrastructure, the Immersive 3D Web and Programmability that must be addressed to enable the wider adoption of Open Virtual Worlds as a routine learning technology platform. We refer to specific use-cases based on OpenSim and abstract generic requirements which should be met to enable the growth in use of Open Virtual Worlds as a mainstream educational facility. A case study of a deployment to support a formal education curriculum and associated informal learning is used to illustrate key points. Postprint

Mobile learning games have increasingly been topic of educational research with the intention to utilize their manifold and ubiquitous capabilities for learning and teaching. This paper presents a review of current research ac-tivities in the field. It particularly focuses is on the educational values serious mobile games provide. The study results substantiate their generally assumed motivational potential. Also, they indicate that mobile learning games may have the potential to bring about cognitive learning outcomes.

Portable and interactive technologies are changing the nature of collaborative learning practices and open up new possibilities for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). Now, activities occurring in and beyond the classroom can be combined and integrated leading to a new type of complex collaborative blended learning scenarios. However, to organize and structure these scenarios is challenging and represent a workload for practitioners, which hinder the adoption of these technology-enhanced practices. As an approach to alleviate this workload, this paper proposes a proof of concept of a technological solution to overcome the limitations detected in an analysis of an actual collaborative blended learning experiment carried out in a previous study. The solution consists on a Unit of Learning suitable to be instantiated with IMS Learning Design and complemented by a GenericService Integration system. This chapter also discusses to which extent the proposed solution covers the limitations detected in the previous study and how useful could be for reducing the orchestration effort in future experiences. This work has been partially funded by the Project Learn3 (TIN2008- 05163/TSI) from the Plan Nacional I+D+I and "Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías para el e-Learning en la Comunidad de Madrid” funded by the Madrid Regional Government under grant No. S2009/TIC-1650.

One of the most common functionalities in cloud-based learning environments is the recommendation of learning resources. Many approaches have been proposed to deploy recommender systems into an educational environment. Currently, there is an increasing interest in including affective information into the process to generate the recommendations for the learner. In this paper, we propose a cloud-based architecture for a system that recommends learning resources according to the affective state of the learner. Furthermore, we provide the details of an implementation of the architecture along with a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of the proposal. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper describes the Learning Resources Affective Recommender, a widget that recommends resources to the learner based on her current affective state and her learning objectives. The widget is meant to be used in a Personalized Learning Environment in combination with widgets to search for resources. The architecture that supports the widget follows a client-server pattern, with the widget as the client and a recommendation service on the server side. The paper includes the description of both client and server and a discussion about the possibilities of this approach. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Learning analytics has emerged as the discipline that fosters the learning process based on monitored data. As learning is a complex process that is not limited to a single environment, it benefits from a holistic approach where events in different contexts and settings are observed and combined. This work proposes an approach to increase this coverage. Detailed information is obtained by combining logs from a LMS and events recorded with a virtual machine given to the students. A set of visualisations is then derived from the collected events showing previously hidden aspects of an experience that can be shown to the teaching staff for their consideration. The visualisations presented focus on different learning outcomes, such as self learning, use of industrial tools, time management, information retrieval, collaboration, etc. Depending on the information to convey, different types of visualisations are considered, ranging from graphs to starbusts and from scatter plots to heatmaps. Work partially funded by the projects: Adaptation of learning scenarios in the .LRN platform based on Contextualized Attention Metadata (CAM) (DE2009-0051), Learn3 (\Plan Nacional de I+D+I" TIN2008-05163/TSI), EEE (\Plan Nacional de I+D+I" TIN 2011-28308-C03-01), and Emadrid: Investigación y desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid (S2009/TIC-1650). Publicado

The use of analytics has gained a relevant level of importance in current learning environments. Due to its life-cycle of observation, analysis and intervention, it is important to make learning analytics available to all the participants of a learning process. A Learning Management System (LMS) is a very suitable platform to present results in the form of visualizations, but the development of custom modules usually requires programming and administrative work. This paper presents a system architecture to embed learning analytics visualizations without having to develop a custom LMS module. Our approach is based on the modification of the LMS' web pages through a browser extension. The details of the implementation are presented, as well as issues that might arise and how to address them. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Proceedings of: 2012 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) "Collaborative Learning & New Pedagogic Approaches in Engineering Education", Marrakesh (Morocco), 17-20 April, 2012. n this paper, an overview is given about the research carried out in the area of mobile teaching and learning by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, a member of the eMadrid Excellence Network. Mobile learning is raising growing expectations and is considered by some authors the next disruptive revolution in education. Cognitive and pedagogical theories supporting this prospect are reviewed. How these theories can be translated into meaningful educational practices is analysed by exploring ways of usage of mobile devices for supporting learning and teaching. Finally, a portfolio of experiments and case studies carried out by the Gradient group of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid testing the application and effects of mobile learning are reported. These experiments show that the use of these devices is changing educational practices in a fundamental way. The eMadrid Excellence Network is being funded by the Madrid Regional Government (Comunidad de Madrid) with grant No. S2009/TIC-1650. We wish to acknowledge stimulating discussions with our partners in the context of the network. Partial support has also been received from the Learn3 project (TIN2008-05163) and the EEE project (TIN2011-28308-C03-01).

Today’s technology enhanced learning scenarios focus on outcome-oriented delivery of learning processes, contents, and services. Also, learners increasingly demand for innovative and motivating learning scenarios that match their habits of using media. The European project ICOPER researches outcome-oriented learning infrastructures for higher education contexts. The German BMBF-project SpITKom aims at transferring such approaches to basic qualification. Based on a Browser Game, it uses ICOPER’s technical infrastructure which combines learning object metadata repositories, learning outcome repositories, learning design repositories and learner profile repositories. This paper initially depicts the technical infrastructure of an outcome-oriented learning scenario that was developed in the course of ICOPER and then outlines its transformation to the game-based learning approach as realized in the course of SpITKom.

Most of the current learning analytic techniques have as starting point the data recorded by Learning Management Systems (LMS) about the interactions of the students with the platform and among themselves. But there is a tendency on students to rely less on the functionality offered by the LMS and use more applications that are freely available on the net. This situation is magnified in studies in which students need to interact with a set of tools that are easily installed on their personal computers. This paper shows an approach using Virtual Machines by which a set of events occurring outside of the LMS are recorded and sent to a central server in a scalable and unobtrusive manner. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Proceedings of: 6th European Conference of Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2011, Palermo, Italy, September 20-23, 2011. This paper presents an approach of collecting contextualized attention metadata combined from inside as well as outside a LMS and analyzing them to create feedback about the student activities for the teaching staff. Two types of analyses were run on the collected data: first, key actions were extracted to identify usage patterns and tendencies throughout the whole course and then usage statistics and patterns were identified for some key actions in more detail. Results of both analyses were visualized and presented to the teaching staff for evaluation. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007- 2013) under grant agreement no 231396 (ROLE project). Work was also partially funded by the Learn3 project (TIN2008-05163/TSI), the eMadrid project (S2009/TIC-1650), and the Acción Integrada DE2009-0051.

IMS Learning Design is a specification to capture the orchestration taking place in a learning scenario. This paper presents an extension called Generic Service Integration. This paradigm allows a bidirectional communication between the course engine in charge of the orchestration and conventional Web 2.0 tools. This communication allows the engine to configure external services so as to adjust their behaviour, and also retrieve information about their activity and use it to influence the orchestration process. This extension impacts all the phases of the life cycle of a learning activity: authoring, deployment and enactment. The paper analyses this impact and proposes appropriate adjustments. A pilot test was conducted and the obtained results show that learning experiences that adapt their flow-based on third party tools while maintaining interoperability, reusability and self-containment requirements are feasible. Work partially funded by the Learn3 project, “Plan Nacional de I+D+I” TIN2008-05163/TSI, the Best Practice Network ICOPER (Grant No. ECP-2007-EDU-417007), the Flexo Project “Plan Nacional de Investigacin Cientfica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica” (Ref. TSI-020301-2008-19), and the “Emadrid: Investigación y desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid” project (S2009/TIC-1650). Publicado

Proceedings of: 6th European Conference of Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2011, Palermo, Italy, September 20-23, 2011. Students in a learning experience can be seen as a community working simultaneously (and in some cases collaboratively) in a set of activities. During these working sessions, students carry out numerous actions that affect their learning. But those actions happening outside a class or the Learning Management System cannot be easily observed. This paper presents a technique to widen the observability of these actions. The set of documents browsed by the students in a course was recorded during a period of eight weeks. These documents are then processed and the set with highest similarity with the course notes are selected and recommended back to all the students. The main problem is that this user community visits thousands of documents and only a small percent of them are suitable for recommendation. Using a combination of lexican analysis and information retrieval techniques, a fully automatic procedure to analyze these documents, classify them and select the most relevant ones is presented. The approach has been validated with an empirical study in an undergraduate engineering course with more than one hundred students. The recommended resources were rated as "relevant to the course" by the seven instructors with teaching duties in the course. Work partially funded by the Learn3 project, “Plan Nacional de I+D+I TIN2008-05163/TSI”, the Acción Integrada Ref. DE2009-0051, the “Emadrid: Investigación y desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid” project (S2009/TIC-1650) and TELMA Project (Plan Avanza TSI-020110-2009-85).

The combination of services that provide personal information in technologies such as educational mashups brings some issues in the management of users' identity and authorization. This article presents a scenario based on the fact that an IMS LD server requires information relevant to each learner, and this information is provided by external services. This scenario allows to describe the problems of user correspondence, authenticated data retrieval, and remote account creation; a solution using technologies currently available is provided for each, as well as recommendations to take into account in similar scenarios. This work has been partially funded by the Project Learn3 (TIN2008-05163/TSI) from the Plan Nacional I+D+I, the Spanish National Project FLEXO (TSI-020301-2008-19,www.ines.org.es/flexo) and ”Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías para el e-Learning en la Comunidad de Madrid” funded by the Madrid Regional Government under grant No. S2009/TIC-1650. Publicado

Proocedings of: 41st Annual Frontiers in Education Conference: Celebrating 41 Years of Monumental Innovations from Around the World (FIE 2011). Rapy City, South Dakota, October 12–15, 2011. IMS Learning Design is considered by many authors the "de facto" standard in educational modeling languages. The versatility of the framework enables its use in very different situations. However, such versatile framework is usually hidden by its complex management. One handicap identified in practical experiences is the lack of flexibility of scripted courses during the enactment phase. The activity sequence and learning resources are rigidly defined during authoring. This fact makes difficult to react to unexpected events that may happen in live courses. Also, this rigidness does not allow instructors to give "their personal touch" to courses. This paper presents the improvements made on GRAIL - an IMS LD compliant player-aimed at the support of a flexible enactment phase. Two types of modifications are considered: the modification of the learning flow and the management of course content with a wiki engine. Finally, this paper discusses how the integration of third party services in the activity sequence relaxes the rigidness of scripted learning flows. Experiences deployed in real scenarios allowed analyzing how such integration offered flexibility in practical situations. Work partially funded by the project “eMadrid: Investigación y desarrollo de tecnologías para el elearning en la Comunidad de Madrid” (S2009/TIC-1650) and the Spanish project “Learn3: Towards Learning of the Third Kind” (TIN2008-05163/TSI). Publicado

Proceedings of: 2010 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), Madrid, Spain, 14-16 April, 2010 Assessment has been one of the areas in computer supported learning where technology has been quickly deployed. Support for computer based assessment is found not only in all Learning Management Systems, but also as stand-alone tools. This large number of tools has led to the appearance of a large number of formats to store, retrieve and exchange assessment material. Although institutions such as the IMS Global Consortium have proposed specifications (e.g. IMS QTI) aimed to facilitate the exchange of this material, in the actual landscape, there are still too many formats that significantly hinder the reuse of this material. In this paper an analysis of the implementation of these formats is described. This work has been partially funded by the iCoper Project (eContentPlus Best Practice Network No. ECP-2007-EDU-417007), Learn3 Project (“Plan Nacional de I+D+I” TIN2008- 05163/TSI), Flexo (AVANZA), España Virtual (CDTI, Ingenio 2010, CENIT), SOLITE (CYTED 508AC0341) Publicado

Proceedings of: First International Conference on Reforming Education, Quality of Teaching and Technology-Enhanced Learning: Learning Technologies, Quality of Education, Educational Systems, Evaluation, Pedagogies (TECH-EDUCATION 2010). Athens, Greece, May 19-21, 2010. Course evaluation is one of the key processes in the educational context that is in charge of the assurance of quality of courses taught in an institution. Although it is an essential process realized in every institution, the procedure followed for course evaluation does not comply with any evaluation standard. The objectives of this document are: to define a course evaluation concept map to understand better the needs of this field; to analyze the course evaluation standard ISO/IEC 19796, the only standard for course evaluation; and finally, to carry out a study of European institutions evaluation processes to determine why anyone is using standards in this learning process. This work was partially funded by Learn3 project, “Plan Nacional de I+D+I” TIN2008-05163/TSI and the Best Practice Network ICOPER (Grant No. ECP-2007-EDU-417007). Publicado

In this paper, we introduce a graph representation of the main elements of our defined RDF binding for contextualized attention metadata (CAM). In addition, we give a brief overview of two applications that we have implemented using the CAM semantic web format. The Zeitgeist and a "find similar users" applications illustrate our approach. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

32 slides.-- Contributed to: 2010 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), Madrid, Spain, 14-16 April, 2010.-- Presented by C. Delgado Kloos. Proceedings of: 2010 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), Madrid, Spain, 14-16 April, 2010 Universidad Carlos III de Madrid is one of the six main participating institutions in the eMadrid excellence network, as well as its coordinating partner. In this paper, the network is presented together with some of the main research lines carried out by UC3M. The remaining papers in this session present the work carried out by the other five universities in the consortium. The Excellence Network eMadrid, “Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías para el e-Learning en la Comunidad de Madrid” is being funded by the Madrid Regional Government under grant No. S2009/TIC-1650. In addition, we acknowledge funding from the following research projects: iCoper: “Interoperable Content for Performance in a Competency-driven Society” (eContentPlus Best Practice Network No. ECP-2007-EDU-417007), Learn3: Hacia el Aprendizaje en la 3ª Fase (“Plan Nacional de I+D+I” TIN2008-05163/ TSI), Flexo: “Desarrollo de aprendizaje adaptativo y accesible en sistemas de código abierto” (AVANZA I+D, TSI-020301- 2008-19), España Virtual (CDTI, Ingenio 2010, CENIT, Deimos Space), SOLITE (CYTED 508AC0341), and “Integración vertical de servicios telemáticos de apoyo al aprendizaje en entornos residenciales” (Programa de creación y consolidación de grupos de investigación de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid). Publicado

Proceedings of: 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems (INCOS 2010): Second International Workshop on Adaptive Systems for Collaborative Learning (IWASCL-2010). Thessaloniki, Greece, 24‐26 November, 2010. The introduction of portable devices in education opens up new possibilities for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning by providing advanced learning scenarios with activities in different spatial locations. However, organizing and structuring collaborative learning adaptive flows in these innovative scenarios represents also a workload for practitioners, which hinder the adoption of these technologies. As a step forward to alleviate this workload, this paper analyzes the limitations and bottlenecks detected in an actual collaborative blended learning experience carried out in a previous study and proposes a technological solution for solving them. The resulting solution is presented as a concept proof consisting of a Unit of Learning suitable to be instantiated with IMS Learning Design and complemented by a Generic Service Integration system. The paper also discusses to which extent the proposed solution covers the limitations detected in the previous study and how useful could be for reducing the orchestration effort in future experiences. This work has been partially funded by the Project Learn3 (TIN2008-05163/TSI) from the Plan Nacional I+D+I, the Spanish National Project FLEXO (TSI-020301-2008-19, www.ines.org.es/flexo) and "Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías para el e-Learning en la Comunidad de Madrid” funded by the Madrid Regional Government under grant No. S2009/TIC-1650. Publicado

6 págs, 1 fig.-- Publicado en la Sección: "Artículos seleccionados de IEEE ICALT" (ICALT'2008 - Eighth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, Santander, Cantabria, Spain, Jul 1-5, 2008). Previamente publicado como ponencia (en inglés) en: Proceedings ICALT'08 - Eighth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, 2008, p. 278-282, http://e-archivo.uc3m.es/handle/10016/8964 Collaborative learning models are widely used in educational institutions. These models require a high interaction level among students and are mainly oriented towards in-class scenarios. But when collaborative models are deployed in a distant scenario, user expressiveness is significantly reduced thus creating a gap that hinders the effectiveness of this collaboration. A computer-supported model provides a set of tools to compensate for the distant scenario and reduce this gap. This paper presents the issues and solutions derived from the design and deployment of a complex collaborative model in a distant scenario. The course structure was captured using the Learning Design specification, and an architecture based on Virtual Network Computing was used to provide the required collaborative tools. The course was included as part of a regular undergraduate program in three higher educational institutions. Trabajo parcialmente financiado por el Programa Nacional de Tecnologías de la Información y de las Comunicaciones, Proyectos MOSAIC (TSI2005-08225-C07-02/04) y LEARN3 (TIN2008-05163/TSI). Publicado

This paper describes the process of translating an adaptive sequencing strategy designed using Sequencing Graphs to the semantics of IMS Learning Design. The relevance of this contribution is twofold. First, it combines the expressive power and flexibility of Sequencing Graphs, and the interoperability capabilities of IMS. Second, it shows some important limitations of IMS specifications (focusing on Learning Design) for the sequencing of learning activities. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper presents an approach to create adaptive web-based educative systems that can be automatically audited by means of standard web testing tools. The auditing tool takes the role of a learner interacting with the system, checking that no errors are present. The tool can communicate with the exercises to know the correct answers to them; a configurable ratio of correct to incorrect answers allows the tool to behave as a range of different students. More complex checking techniques will be tested in the future using this architecture. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Flexibility is an intrinsic property present in any learning environment. When capturing the structure of a learning experience with conventional languages such as Learning Design, this flexibility can be seriously compromised. In this document two mechanisms are proposed to avoid this pitfall. On one hand, flexibility needs to be considered from the early stages of the design phase. Editors need to include default constructions to easily accommodate changes. On the other hand, run-time environments need to offer the possibility of changing most of the execution parameters with an intuitive interface available to the teaching staff. © 2008 IEEE. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Course evaluation is one of the key processes in the educational context that is in charge of the assurance of quality of courses taught in an institution. Although it is an essential process realised in every institution, the procedure followed for course evaluation does not comply with any evaluation standard. The objectives of this document are: to define a course evaluation concept map to understand better the needs of this field; to analyse the course evaluation standard ISO/IEC 19796, the only standard for course evaluation; to carry out a study of European institutions evaluation processes to determine why no institution is using standards in this learning process; and finally, to inform about the course evaluation support in two open-source well-known learning management systems (LMS) (Moodle and .LRN). This work was partially funded by the Best Practice Network ICOPER (Grant No. ECP-2007-EDU-417007), the Learn3 project, ‘Plan Nacional de I + D + I’ TIN2008–05163/TSI, and the eMadrid network, S2009/TIC-1650, ‘Investigación y Desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid.’ Publicado

The evolution seen on the Web during the last few years has put the users in the center of the interaction. A similar tendency is perceived in education, thus making the combination of Web 2.0 technology and learning a natural setting. But, simply deploying Web 2.0 tools in a learning environment is no guarantee of success. In this document, the deployment of these tools in a course based on problem-based learning is explained. The course required intense interaction between a group of students and tutors collectively solving five different problems. A Learning Management System enhanced with Web 2.0 tools was used to host all the interaction. The results were extremely positive. Students used the tools to extend the interaction between the face-toface meetings and a rich set of documents were collectively created. Refereed/Peer-reviewed