Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the educational landscape, offering unprecedented opportunities to personalize learning, optimize administrative processes, and enhance student outcomes. However, alongside its benefits, the integration of AI into education presents significant ethical challenges that require structured and responsible approaches to ensure its effective and equitable use. This paper introduces the INTEGRITY AI Model, a structured and progressive framework designed to guide the ethical adoption of AI in educational settings. The foundation of the INTEGRITY AI Model is an initial diagnostic assessment that identified critical gaps in teachers' understanding of academic integrity, the subtle forms of misconduct facilitated by AI, and the need for continuous professional development in technological literacy. Based on these insights, the model addresses three key levels: Guiding Principles, which provide ethical guidelines and best practices to establish a shared foundation for teachers and students; Training Actions, which focus on capacity-building through specialized courses, workshops, and awareness initiatives to enhance ethical AI integration; and Impact and Empowerment, which prioritizes the dissemination of resources, the promotion of accessibility, and the creation of spaces for reflection and dialogue to foster a culture of academic integrity. This study underscores the importance of aligning the adoption of AI technologies with robust ethical frameworks, addressing both pedagogical and institutional dimensions. By incorporating actionable strategies and a scalable structure, the INTEGRITY AI Model serves as a replicable resource for educational institutions seeking to navigate the complexities of AI integration responsibly. The model's implementation highlights its relevance and effectiveness, as evidenced by the positive reception of its guides, workshops, and online resources. The results of this research affirm the value of structured ethical approaches in enhancing the responsible use of AI, promoting awareness, and equipping educators and students with tools to address ethical challenges. By fostering a reflective academic culture, the INTEGRITY AI Model maximizes the potential of AI technologies while ensuring their ethical and equitable application in education. This framework provides a path forward for institutions aiming to embrace AI's transformative potential responsibly and sustainably.

This work-in-progress paper explores the integration of Digital Credentials in the context of engineering and STEAM education, offering insights into their evolving role within the future educational landscape. In a brief literature overview, current trends and legislative considerations relevant to Digital Credentials are highlighted, emphasizing their anticipated significance in shaping the educational environment. Digital Credentials, a manifestation of individuals' skills, achievements, and qualifications in electronic format, serve as verifiable and portable representations of educational accomplishments. Unlike traditional paper-based certificates, Digital Credentials harness the power of technology to encapsulate a comprehensive range of information, including specific skills, competencies, and the context in which they were acquired. The focal point of this study is the practical experience of incorporating Digital Credentials into a Virtual Learning Environment. In a first experience 1496 digital diplomas were generated to certify four STEAM courses. Findings from the initial implementation within diverse engineering-focused continuous education programs are presented, shedding light on participant responses and the potential influence of Digital Credentials on motivation and engagement. This practical insight contributes to the ongoing discourse on innovative educational practices, showcasing the transformative potential of Digital Credentials. Looking ahead, the paper advocates for the establishment of a common space or observatory dedicated to Digital Credentials in education. This call is rooted in the recognition of the need for ongoing dialogue and collaboration among educators, researchers, and policymakers to collectively navigate the evolving landscape of Digital Credentials and harness their potential in shaping the future of education.

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the field of education is an unprecedented trend with the potential to revolutionize teaching approaches and significantly improve the overall learning experience. This workshop offers an opportunity for a strategic implementation of generative artificial intelligence in higher education, demonstrating its capacity to substantially enhance the creation and customization of digital educational materials. It is essential for educators to possess the capacity to utilize generative artificial intelligence tools, specifically when it comes to developing prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs). In addition to fostering a more interactive learning environment, these LLMs are driving the transition to educational systems that are more autonomous and adaptable. An in-depth exploration of the pragmatic and ethical aspects of generative AI implementation is undertaken to equip educators with the necessary knowledge and skills to employ AI in a responsible manner, thereby cultivating an engaging and equitable learning environment. This workshop was prepared based on successful previous experiences in different conferences and meetings in Spain, Portugal, Germany, México, Guatemala, Colombia, and USA.

A remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that enables students to access real equipment located somewhere else through the Internet. The access to the equipment is just the first part, for a correct implementation, the interaction, feedback and troubleshooting is vital. The laboratories are typically deployed in universities or research centers. A key factor of remote laboratories is that once they are available through the Internet their usage can be scaled up and naturally used by students. The installation and maintenance of multifunctional remote laboratories can represent high costs, that is the reason why some institutions choose to rent the equipment for short periods of time. Thus, two or more institutions can share different equipment to reduce costs. Furthermore, this enables a sharing economy where multiple institutions provide access to their laboratories to each other, in different economic models (freely or with a cost). However, the demand identified in times of pandemic has required great efforts on the part of engineering faculties to continue training their students. The COVID-19 pandemic suddenly paralyzed universities all around the world. During the COVID- 19 lockdown, universities switched to distance teaching and canceled face-to-face education affecting the way of teaching. IT staff was urged to find alternatives to train teachers in designing diverse learning activities to meet the learning objectives. This work presents the experience of implementing a group of remote laboratories in courses related to Electronics and Electric subjects at various levels of engineering. By incorporating the principles of Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle, this work investigates key factors and pedagogical considerations for the design of effective remote laboratory activities. The findings highlight the importance of providing students with hands-on, experiential learning opportunities, even in remote settings, to enhance their understanding and application of theoretical concepts in engineering education. To date, the institution represented by the authors' research group has implemented over 44 courses with learning activities utilizing pilot remote laboratories, benefiting more than 375 students. This paper presents the main lessons learned from these experiences.

The irruption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based chatbot tools is undoubtedly at the frontiers of education. AI chatbots in education has emerged as a promising solution to enhance the quality of education and to improve learning outcomes. As all new technology does, it has begun to generate news about prohibition, ethical aspects, anti-plagiarism detection tools, and a series of policies from different educational systems. However, we should not deny the positive aspects of these tools if they are well used. AI-based chatbots have interesting potential to help both teachers and students, who must learn to use them well for their own benefit. This article provides an overview of AI-based chatbots, particularly ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence language model developed by OpenAI. GPT, or “Generative Pre-Training Transformer” is a neural network trained to generate “human-like text” by predicting the next word in a sequence given a large dataset of examples. ChatGPT uses the neural network model and is used to generate responses to students' questions in real time, in the sense of a personal teacher assistant. Chatbots are designed to be able to carryon a natural conversation by understanding the context of the conversation, generating appropriate responses, and engaging in active interaction. Nowadays, this type of tool can generate more than just text; for example, the use of LaTeX code (using TeXGPT) or tools for coding and debugging programming exercises. This work explores the potential role that AI-based chatbots can have in engineering education, by examining the answers of a group of teachers' about how the use of AI-based chatbots can improve the learning process of the students in engineering education. The questions that teachers had to answer, from a pedagogical and technological perspective, are related to how chatbots can be integrated into the curriculum to enhance the efficiency of engineering education, their potential impact on the learning process, and actual examples of possible learning activities using AI-based chatbots in their courses.

This work presents an innovative framework with the aim to create full engagement for the learners on massive open online learning environments. The proposed framework was prepared with the aim to increase the engagement and motivation of the student from the enrollment step to the start of the course, but the most important objective is to extend the interaction beyond the end of the course, the post-MOOC phase. This work explores the experience from two "MicroMaster" specializations in the edX platform: "Professional Android Developer" and one specialization taught in Spanish: "E-Learning for teachers: create innovative activities and content".

Constant evolution of technology triggers a large myriad of research related to accessibility in Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). In the same way, international initiatives provide guidelines to create accessible web content, but educational institutions, especially in Latin-America (LA), are not aware of the VLE barriers that could affect students with disabilities. The fulfillment of accessibility standards in a virtual campus provides benefits for all the academic community that in some cases could face difficulties to learn through the VLE. This work proposes an innovative practice to implement, promote and include accessibility features in a VLE through an intensive training workshop based on best practices. This approach is addressed to technical staff involved in the installation, maintenance and support of e-Learning solutions in academic institutions, with a special focus on software and web engineering. A first staff training experience was implemented in seven countries in LA with more than 180 participants from 52 different Higher Education Institutions (HEI). Results from the experience manifest a growing interest from HEIs in accessibility topics and encourage improving the workshop materials for new editions. The design of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) based on the workshop will allow the initiative to reach a broader audience.

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are constantly adopting Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to improve and enhance the learning process. In this sense, constant evolution of assistive technologies helps users with disabilities to have a complete set of choices to access digital content while working with Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), but an intense training for stakeholders involved in curriculum design should be prepared to achieve an integral inclusive solution. This article proposes an innovative practice to implement, validate and promote a working methodology to produce an inclusive curriculum design, where teachers and staff administrators have a relevant role while designing, preparing and imparting accessible and inclusive courses. Teachers need to be instructed on how to generate accessible documents and how to provide truly accessible curriculum developments. This work presents an initiative promoted by ESVI-AL project, looking to improve accessibility in virtual higher education through the definition of systematic and replicable methodological processes for the design and implementation of accessible virtual curriculum developments. A first training experience for teachers in Latin-America is presented.

This paper explores the relationship between accessible learning objects and accessible Web content. On the one hand it takes into consideration the standard ISO/IEC 24751 to describe the process of using an accessible on-line educational system, which takes into account the needs and preferences of the student and contains accessibility metadata of the learning objects. On the other hand it takes into consideration the standard ISO/IEC 40500 to describe the accessibility guidelines of the Web content underlying those concepts that can be applied to the learning objects. Based on the idea that a learning object is also a web content, a study has been carried out to discover the mandatory accessibility metadata that must necessarily be included into a learning object to meet accessibility levels A, AA and AAA.

This paper presents a tool to help the completion of the metadata of the IMS Access for All v3.0 specification, which main objective is to simplify the definition of the accessibility metadata for learning objects and the preferences and needs of the users of these objects. The LOMPad tool has been modified for helping the accessible learning objects creators to complete the set of specification's accessibility metadata and to create the XML files that represent them. This tool also helps users to create their XML files with the preferences and needs metadata. This tool has been developed by the authors at the University of Alcala (Spain) in the field of project ESVIAL.

Cloud education environments consider all the cloud services, such as Web 2.0 applications, content, or infrastructure services. These services form an e-learning ecosystem which can be built upon the learning objectives and the preferences of the learner group. A great variety of existing cloud services might be repurposed for educational activities and it can be taken advantage from already widely used services without steep learning curves on their adoption. In this article is presented the design, deployment and evaluation of learning activities using cloud applications and services. The experiences presented here are from Galileo University in Guatemala with students from three different countries in Central America and Spain. This study reports findings from motivational attitudes, emotional aspects and usability perception. Selected cloud-based tools were used for the different learning activities in three courses in various application domains. These activities include collaboration, knowledge representation, storytelling activities and social networking. Experimentation results obtained aim to demonstrate that students are eager to use and have new and more interactive ways of learning, which challenges their creativity and group organization skills, while professors have a growing interest on using new tools and resources that are easy to use, mix and reuse. Thus, future research should focus on incentives for motivating participation as well as on providing systems with high usability, accessibility and interoperability that are capable of doing learning orchestration.

The research area of self-regulated learning (SRL) has shown the importance of the learner’s role in their cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies to self-regulate their learning. One fundamental step is to self-assess the knowledge acquired, to identify key concepts, and review the understanding about them. In this paper, we present an experimental setting in Guatemala, with students from several countries. The study provides evaluation results from the use of an enhanced automatic question creation tool (EAQC) for a self-regulated learning online environment. In addition to assessment quality, motivational and emotional aspects, usability, and tasks value are addressed. The EAQC extracts concepts from a given text and automatically creates different types of questions based on either the self-generated concepts or on concepts supplied by the user. The findings show comparable quality of automatically and human generated concepts, while questions created by a teacher were in part evaluated higher than computer-generated questions. Whereas difficulty and terminology of questions were evaluated equally, teacher questions where considered to be more relevant and more meaningful. Therefore, future improvements should especially focus on these aspects of questions quality.

Learning through Social Network Sites, like Facebook, is a trending topic nowadays, especially since many studies report that students spend more time online in this type of sites. In this article, a case study of a collaborative learning activity with university professors is presented in the context of an online course. From a CSCL perspective, we present results of interaction comparing Social Networks Sites to traditional online forums within a Learning Management System, and the perception of participants in using Facebook for learning activities.