Students’ feedback is an essential part of the teaching-learning process and serves as an effective instrument for continuous improvement in educational environments. The insights gathered from students’ experiences and perceptions expressed in reviews provide instructors with a valuable resource to enhance their teaching methods, instructional design, and overall classroom dynamics. However, students’ reviews are often unclear, contradictory, and conflicting with each other, making their interpretation and use challenging. Therefore, this study proposes a novel deep learning-based approach that helps course designers and instructors effectively identify constructive and useful reviews. The approach leverages the integration of several attributes, including textual review, student satisfaction, meta-data of the course, and review-derived information such as sentiment, readability, and review depth. The approach is tested on a real-life dataset comprising 38,717 reviews gathered from the Coursera learning platform for the purpose of this study. The experimental results, with an F1-score of 0.91, suggest that the approach can be an effective tool for educators and instructional designers to identify helpful student reviews.

A new form of distance and blended education has hit the market in recent years with the advent of massive open online courses (MOOCs) which have brought many opportunities to the educational sector. Consequently, the availability of learning content to vast demographics of people and across locations has opened up a plethora of possibilities for everyone to gain new knowledge through MOOCs. This poses an immense issue to the content providers as the amount of manual effort required to structure properly and to organize the content automatically for millions of video lectures daily become incredibly challenging. This paper, therefore, addresses this issue as a small part of our proposed personalized content management system by exploiting the voice pattern of the lecturer for identification and for classifying video lectures to the right speaker category. The use of Mel frequency Cepstral coefficients (MFCC) as 2D input features maps to 2D-CNN has shown promising results in contrast to machine learning and deep learning classifiers - making text-independent speaker identification plausible in MOOC setting for automatic video lecture categorization. It will not only help categorize educational videos efficiently for easy search and retrieval but will also promote effective utilization of micro-lectures and multimedia video learning objects (MLO).

Proprietary software solutions are extensively deployed through multiple platforms including desktop, web and mobile devices. Such systems are in many cases closed, thus making it difficult for software developers to expand and create additional features to these systems. Recent research in the field of web and mobile technologies indicates that open systems are more successful than those based on proprietary technologies. In this paper, we investigate and analyze existing research related to the notion of open architectures. We conducted a literature survey of the state of the art projects and definitions related to this concept. Our efforts have resulted in a refined definition of the term followed by a conceptual model of an open architecture contextualized within the field of web and mobile software. The model primarily relies on four key characteristics, namely flexibility, evolvability, customizability and extensibility. Furthermore, we present a validation plan based on the GQM approach that further instantiates these characteristics into a set of properties that can serve as metrics.

This paper presents and discusses our efforts aiming to expand the potential of an existing CSCL environment through the integration with additional software applications in order to support a cross context learning activity. We used a CSCL environment for supporting asynchronous types of interactions, mobile devices for face-to-face interaction and a dedicated web application for self-assessment. We present the design and implementation of a scripted learning activity that deals with negotiation styles and describe the integration of different software applications that supported the students’ interactions along the various activity phases. The results indicate the potential and benefits of the integrative approach using collaborative and mobile technologies in order to support and enhance a wide range of pedagogical activities.

UXeLATE2012 is the 1st International ACM Workshop on User Experience in e-Learning and Augmented Technologies in Education in conjunction with the ACM International Multimedia Conference (MM'12) at Nara, Japan. The workshop has a half day program, with a selection of six papers, and one keynote talk of a recognized expert in the field of usability, mobile technology and education.

In this paper we present our pedagogical and technological approach for supporting the design of novel situated learning activities that can be conducted both, outside the school and in the classroom. One main goal is to enhance the content of the curricula by bringing multimedia resources and mobile support to outdoor settings thus enriching the field experience. In order to illustrate these ideas we describe the outcomes of a trial we have conducted with thirty elementary school children. Moreover, we present the ubiquitous computing solutions we developed in order to support learning activities in the field of history. The results of our experiments indicate that children enjoyed learning in these kinds of environments where mobile devices are used in situ, thus supporting the learning activities in the context of which they are taking place.

In this paper we report the results of our work exploring the design and implementation of mobile services to support knowledge workers. The purpose of these efforts was to investigate and identify how contextual information extracted from everyday activities can be used to generate the content of a mobile service to be delivered to smart phones. In this particular effort, 10 librarians from Växjö public library participated in this trial during a period of 30 days. Generally, the service we developed integrated very well into the librarians’ daily work.