This paper presents the basis of the GENIE Learn project, a coordinated three-year research project funded by the Spanish Research Agency. The main goal of GENIE Learn is to improve Smart Learning Environments (SLEs) for Hybrid Learning (HL) support by integrating Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools in a way that is aligned with the preferences and values of human stakeholders. This article focuses on analyzing the problems of this research context, as well as the affordances that GenAI can bring to solve these problems, but considering also the risks and challenges associated with the use of GenAI in education. The paper also details the objectives, methodology, and work plan, and expected contributions of the project in this context.

University education develops professional identities by instilling knowledge, skills, and attitudes. In engineering, this process often prioritizes technical expertise over societal considerations, fostering a narrow view of the “good engineer.” However, the growing need for ethics literacy - understanding and integrating technology's societal impacts into their professional practice - requires a broader perspective, particularly in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), where ethical compliance is also increasingly mandated by regulatory frameworks. This study explores whether the medical profession's wellestablished social contract, which balances specialized knowledge with societal responsibility, can serve as an effective model for integrating ethics into engineering identities. Using qualitative analysis, it investigates how exposing ICT engineering students to this analogy reshapes their perceptions of their professional roles. Results suggest that the medical analogy encourages students to expand their understanding of engineering as a socially impactful profession, emphasizing societal welfare alongside technical competence. This approach demonstrates the potential of analogies to foster ethical literacy and reshape professional identities, contributing to discussions on ethical literacy and professional identity formation in engineering education.

This study investigates how different dashboard designs (i.e., mirroring and alerting dashboards) affect the orchestration actions of teachers in Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). The data collected in this study, including dashboard screen recordings, log data, and observation notes, were gathered from a single teacher who has prior knowledge of using the orchestration tool used in this study. Teacher orchestration actions are categorized based on a coding scheme that combines orchestration load facets (Situation Evaluation and Action Taking) and the ACAD framework. Results reveal that the alerting dashboard prompted 166 teacher orchestration actions, more than the 116 actions performed with the mirroring dashboard. Alerts facilitated orchestration actions, such as extending activity time (SET), Reviewed students' answers (EPSTIMIC), and monitoring collaboration (SOCIAL), emphasizing their role in the dashboard's ability to effectively guide teachers in orchestrating CSCL activities. While the mirroring dashboard appears less effective in managing student interactions and leaves more data interpretation up to the teachers, it still contributes to effective orchestration. Therefore, the results indicate that although both dashboards contribute to orchestration, the alerting dashboard may guide teachers more effectively in orchestrating the CSCL activities. The study suggests some guidelines to improve the alerts in the dashboards, such as customized alerts and contextual recommendations that can support teachers in regulating CSCL activities.

Educational institutions are increasingly adopting data-driven approaches, yet there appears to be insufficient exploration into the development of so-called Institutional and Academic Analytics and how these terms intersect with Learning Analytics (LA). This study conducts a bibliometric analysis (last 10 years) as an initial step to explore this gap. Our results illuminate evolving but inconsistent interest in Institutional and Academic Analytics across time and across publication venues. The results also indicate a need for the LA community to clarify its connections with related applications of data analytics focused on students and their contexts while reflecting on and potentially expanding its areas of impact.

Social media use among teenagers has surged in recent years, heightening their exposure to risks such as online grooming—a process where adults build online relationships with minors for abusive purposes. To address this threat, it is essential to explore innovative, technological approaches for educating adolescents. Therefore, this study sees the development of a narrative-based mini game to help educate adolescents about online grooming. A pilot study with 25 adolescents and young adults evaluated the mini-game's effectiveness in assessing their understanding of grooming and detection skills through a questionnaire and their in-game behavior. The results demonstrate that the mini-game significantly improved participants' knowledge of grooming and their ability to detect grooming behaviors, as evidenced by enhanced performance throughout the game.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, such as large language models (LLMs), generate natural language and other types of content to perform a wide range of tasks. This represents a significant technological advancement that poses opportunities and challenges to educational research and practice. This commentary brings together contributions from nine experts working in the intersection of learning and technology and presents critical reflections on the opportunities, challenges, and implications related to GenAI technologies in the context of education. In the commentary, it is acknowledged that GenAI’s capabilities can enhance some teaching and learning practices, such as learning design, regulation of learning, automated content, feedback, and assessment. Nevertheless, we also highlight its limitations, potential disruptions, ethical consequences, and potential misuses. The identified avenues for further research include the development of new insights into the roles human experts can play, strong and continuous evidence, human-centric design of technology, necessary policy, and support and competence mechanisms. Overall, we concur with the general skeptical optimism about the use of GenAI tools such as LLMs in education. Moreover, we highlight the danger of hastily adopting GenAI tools in education without deep consideration of the efficacy, ecosystem-level implications, ethics, and pedagogical soundness of such practices.

In the context of Social Media literacy, the success of educational interventions relies on designing motivational learning environments that seek students’ engagement. Despite existing achievements in social media education to include more appealing resources (e.g. gamification, authentic learning, interactive simulations), limited research has explored the factors that influence students’ engagement. This study aims to investigate the factors that influence engagement in an educational social media platform. Specifically, the factors that shape interest and enjoyment in Instareal, an educational tool that combines narrative scripts and collaborative learning flow patterns to educate teenagers about social media risks and challenges. To answer our research questions, we analyze the log data generated by high school students (N = 100) who tested a Social Media Literacy training with the support of Instareal. A factor analysis and a backward stepwise regression is performed over a dataset containing students’ traces of online activities and social interactions. The results show that factors such as the social participation of the students (comments, likes), curiosity (opening profiles, following others), and the quality of their answers influence interest and enjoyment within the platform. The results of this study offer new insights into measuring and enhancing student engagement when using educational social media environments.

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) seeks to improve students’ learning with the support of technology. Although CSCL facilitates an enriching environment for cooperation, CSCL activities might be affected by asymmetrical participation. Group awareness tools have proven to enhance learners’ interactions, balancing the levels of participation and increasing the learning outcomes. This study investigates the effect of a group awareness tool (GAT) on participation within synchronous CSCL activities in the context of extracurricular activities. We designed a quasi-experimental within-subject study (GAT exposure and control condition) and tested an ad hoc GAT in a web-based CSCL platform with high school students (N = 140). The measured variables included the effect of the GAT on students’ participation and the quality of discussion. A complementary analysis evaluated students’ perceptions of the tool. Results revealed that the implementation of a GAT encourages students to take part in CSCL discussions without explicitly hindering its quality. Even so, the balance of participation was not significantly affected. Students further reported that they found the GAT useful to regulate collaboration. The results from the study provide further knowledge of the functioning of group awareness tools in secondary education and share an insight into how students perceive them.

The integration of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) activities into formal education is encouraged by policy makers to promote engineering and science studies among young people. Studies show that students would be more motivated if they connected STEM learning with real-world problems. We sought to understand how teachers used information about citizen science (CS) projects to promote knowledge connected to real-world problems. Our goal was to understand the design implications of a digital tool that could inspire teachers to create learning activities focused on real-world problems using data from CS projects and SDGs. This study described how we involved key stakeholders in the tool’s co-design process (N = 135). Results showed that key tool functionalities were optimised in the following sequence: search bar, filter(s), graphs and maps, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), real problems and CS project information, educational resources and links to other websites.

Educational chatbots come with a promise of interactive and personalized learning experiences, yet their development has been limited by the restricted free interaction capabilities of available platforms and the difficulty of encoding knowledge in a suitable format. Recent advances in language learning models with zero-shot learning capabilities, such as ChatGPT, suggest a new possibility for developing educational chatbots using a prompt-based approach. We present a case study with a simple system that enables mixed-turn interactions and discuss the insights and preliminary guidelines obtained from initial tests. We examine ChatGPT's ability to pursue natural educational conversations, adapt the educational activity to users' characteristics, such as culture, age, and level of education, and its ability to use diverse educational strategies and conversational styles. Although the results are encouraging, challenges are posed by the highly structured form of responses by ChatGPT, as well as their variability, which can lead to an unexpected switch of the chatbot's role from a teacher to a therapist. We provide some initial guidelines to address these issues and to facilitate the development of effective educational chatbots.

Abstract We present a platform and a dataset to help research on Music Emotion Recognition (MER). We developed the Music Enthusiasts platform aiming to improve the gathering and analysis of the so-called “ground truth” needed as input to MER systems. Firstly, our platform involves engaging participants using citizen science strategies and generate music emotion annotations – the platform presents didactic information and musical recommendations as incentivization, and collects data regarding demographics, mood, and language from each participant. Participants annotated each music excerpt with single free-text emotion words (in native language), distinct forced-choice emotion categories, preference, and familiarity. Additionally, participants stated the reasons for each annotation – including those distinctive of emotion perception and emotion induction. Secondly, our dataset was created for personalized MER and contains information from 181 participants, 4721 annotations, and 1161 music excerpts. To showcase the use of the dataset, we present a methodology for personalization of MER models based on active learning. The experiments show evidence that using the judgment of the crowd as prior knowledge for active learning allows for more effective personalization of MER systems for this particular dataset. Our dataset is publicly available and we invite researchers to use it for testing MER systems.

This paper presents the H2O Learn (Hybrid and Human-Oriented Learning) project, a coordinated research project funded by the Spanish Research Agency, which just started in 2021 and will last for three years. The main goal of the H2O Learn project is to build Trustworthy and Human-Centered Learning Analytics (TaHCLA) solutions to support human stakeholders when designing, orchestrating and (self-,socially- or co-) regulating learning in Hybrid Learning (HL). The contributions of H2O Learn consider key requirements for trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI), as defined by the European Commission: 1) fostering human (i.e., teachers, learners…) agency; 2) enabling transparency of the Learning Analytics (LA) systems; 3) seeking socio-emotional and inclusive wellbeing; and 4) promoting accountability by enabling the assessment of algorithms and design processes.

This study investigates the extent to which Electrodermal Activity (EDA) sensor data can be triangulated with self-perception measures to estimate facets of teachers’ orchestration load in the context of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). It was expected to observe variances in the EDA signal as a result of stressful moments and incidents related to orchestration. Study findings indicated that EDA variations concurred with situations in which the teacher reported feeling stressed when orchestrating CSCL Pyramid scripts.

Teacher-led debriefing has the potential to positively affect learning gains when conducted at the end of collaborative learning activities. In order for debriefing to be effective, the teacher needs to base it on the learner’s process during the activity. Research in the field of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is proposing teaching-facing dashboards as tools that facilitate the monitoring and orchestration of activities. However, research has paid less attention to how these dashboards can support debriefing. We explore how adding a “flagging” feature to a CSCL orchestration dashboard can support debriefing by reporting a qualitative preliminary study in which the flagging feature was used during a Pyramid CSCL script activity. Results indicate that the dashboard interface design, number of student responses, number of errors in student responses, and whether student responses meet the teachers expectations most influence the use and utility of the feature. Additionally, we identified avenues for improving and extending the design of the feature.

Online communities (OC) offer teachers a context for mutual inspiration, collaboration, and professional development. Yet, despite there being several studies analyzing teachers' motivations to participate in these communities, it is still unclear how these motivations relate with the supporting collaborative platforms and how they can serve as an input for defining and prioritizing design requirements. A survey study was conducted with the participants of an open online and a face-to-face training course in the different phases of a 'Maker' educational activity, which were introduced to a supporting platform for sharing, exploring, and co-creating learning designs. Information about 170 teachers' self-reported motivations to participate in a collaborative environment and their perceptions about the usefulness of the implemented features was gathered. Findings show that participants' main motivations are not only to gain knowledge, but also include to have fun or to collaborate with the community development. Regarding their perception about the supporting platform, more than the 30% of the participants acknowledged the usefulness of the features implemented and identified the lack of resources and training as the main limitations to participate. Results provide evidence of the importance of the participants motivations to determine design requirements for a platform to enhance collaboration within an OC of teachers.

This paper analyzes the effect that three different approaches for teacher professional development based on the maker education have on teachers' self-perceived ability for implementing the maker educational practices. The results indicate that there is a significant improvement regarding the feeling of being able to design maker-based educational lessons after participating in any of the professional development courses. Concretely, individual and practical activities requiring the development of a maker project are the ones that help the most to improve teachers' self-perception regarding the maker and STEM education in primary education levels.

The accelerated adoption of digital technologies by people and communities results in a close relation between, on one hand, the state of individual and societal well-being and, on the other hand, the state of the digital technologies that underpin our life experiences. The ethical concerns and questions about the impact of such technologies on human well-being become more crucial when data analytics and intelligent competences are integrated. To investigate how learning technologies could impact human well-being considering the promising and concerning roles of learning analytics, we apply the initial phase of the recently produced IEEE P7010 Well-being Impact Assessment, a methodology and a set of metrics, to allow the digital well-being of a set of educational technologies to be more comprehensively tackled and evaluated. We posit that the use of IEEE P7010 well-being metrics could help identify where educational technologies supported by learning analytics would increase or decrease well-being, providing new routes to future technological innovation in Learning Analytics research.

Researchers have demonstrated the effectiveness of self-explanations (SE) as an instructional practice and study strategy. However, there is a lack of work studying the characteristics of SE responses prompted by collaborative activities. In this paper, we use writing analytics to investigate differences between SE text responses resulting from individual versus collaborative learning activities. A Coh-Metrix analysis suggests that students in the collaborative SE activity demonstrated a higher level of comprehension. Future research should explore how writing analytics can be incorporated into CSCL systems to support student performance of SE activities.

Learning to learn has been identified as an underdeveloped yet critical skill for learners. However, interventions often struggle to alter learner behavior in a lasting manner. We conducted a quasi-experimental study, guided by the Fogg Behavior Model, that involved 83 first-year university students in a computer engineering degree program. Our study examined learner levels of motivation, self-assessments of their abilities, and preferences for future interventions related to learning to learn. Our results suggest that student learning to learn skills are underdeveloped, not all students are motivated to improve their learning skills, and ICT-based solutions are preferred to more traditional educational approaches.

Whether deciding to participate in a study or gain access to online applications, research suggests that individuals often fail to understand the conditions they agree to when giving consent. Limited comprehension related to the risks of big data and habituation may contribute to consent being given in a manner that counters the best interests of individuals (i.e. a privacy paradox). Who is responsible for helping students learn to make informed decisions regarding the sharing of their data? We conducted a quasi-experimental study involving 127 undergraduate students. We explored the effects on study enrolment of supporting students in making informed data sharing decisions. Prior to reading the consent form for a study involving the evaluation of a collaborative learning application, one group of participants was primed to think about data sharing risks and evaluate their participation in terms of a harm-benefit decision whereas the other group was not. The primed group scored lower on a consent form comprehension quiz yet had higher enrolment rates and were more likely to cite trust as reasoning for enrolling in the study.

Self-reports of affective states are increasingly being collected in educational settings. However, individual definitions and usage of emotion and mood terms are often subjective despite objective definitions becoming more widely accepted. We explore whether the variation among individual learners in how mood terms are defined presents an obstacle to using self-reported mood data for group comparison studies. Following a design-based research methodology, we ran two case studies to explore the use of ClassMood App in a multimodal learning study and the validity of the self-reported mood data it collected. During the first case, 24 primary school students experienced difficulty understanding the words used to describe the moods in ClassMood App. In the second case, involving 77 university students, we explored whether the misunderstanding of mood words persisted with older students. Participants were asked to rate their familiarity with and match definitions to a set of 8 mood words. We found that levels of familiarity with the mood words varied greatly and 17.9% of all definition matching attempts were incorrect. The results suggest that the variation in subjective definitions of mood terms is likely to affect the validity of the data collected by the ClassMood App for group comparison studies.

Involving teachers in the design of technology-enhanced learning environments is a useful method towards bridging the gap between research and practice. This is especially relevant for learning analytics tools, wherein the presentation of educational data to teachers or students requires meaningful sense-making to effectively support data-driven actions. In this paper, we present two case studies carried out in the context of two research projects in the USA and Spain which aimed to involve teachers in the co-design of learning analytics tools through professional development programs. The results of a cross-case analysis highlight lessons learned around challenges and principles regarding the meaningful involvement of teachers in learning analytics tooling design.

This paper explores how the use of smartphones vs. laptops influences students’ engagement, behaviour and experience watching academic videos in a collaborative classroom. Experiments were run in authentic teaching sessions with a total of 483 first-year higher education students. The methodology applied is a quasi-experimental design with post-test-only, being the independent variable, the device used to visualise the academic videos. Results indicate that the use of laptops has provided better results in terms of student’s engagement with the videos, their collaborative behaviour and satisfaction with the device. Hence, the findings of this research suggest that the type of mobile device used in activities that consider the use of videos in a collaborative class need to be carefully chosen to maximise the student’s comfortability – and in consequence, their engagement with the video-based learning activity and their positive behaviour and experience within the collaborative context.

Well-structured collaborative learning groups scripted based on Collaborative Learning Flow Patterns (CLFPs) often result in successful collaborative learning outcomes. Formulation of such learner groups based on instructor defined criteria promises potentially effective performance of participating students. However, forming student groups manually based on multiple criteria often fails due to its complexity and the time limitations of practitioners. Hence, an intelligent assistance which supports adaptive collaboration scripting based on instructor defined criteria, while adhering to CLFPs is presented. Constraint Optimization techniques have been used for learner group formation and preliminary tests revealed that the proposed approach could be utilized when formulating student groups while satisfying team formation criteria.

Student's learning happens where the learner is, rather than being constrained to a single physical or digital environment. It is of high relevance for the LAK community to provide analytics support in blended learning scenarios where students can interact at diverse learning spaces and with a variety of educational tools. This workshop aims to gather the sub-community of LAK researchers, learning scientists and researchers in other areas, interested in the intersection between ubiquitous, mobile and/or classroom learning analytics. The underlying concern is how to integrate and coordinate learning analytics seeking to understand the particular pedagogical needs and context constraints to provide learning analytics support across digital and physical spaces. The goals of the workshop are to consolidate the Cross-LAK sub-community and provide a forum for idea generation that can build up further collaborations. The workshop will also serve to disseminate current work in the area by both producing proceedings of research papers and working towards a journal special issue.

The use of computer based games for education can improve the learning process. The design of computer based games and the way the users might interact with them is an important and open issue as there are many possibilities and variables to take into account. This paper describes the design and evaluation of shopC, an educational computer board game driven by technology, based on the traditional well-known Monopoly game. Three different dimensions are considered: motivation, learning and gaming. We show the introduction and the evaluation of the game in a pilot study with 58 students from primary school interacting with the computer based game. This evaluation validates the design of the computer based game regarding the three dimensions (motivation, learning and gaming) and suggests a positive effect in the learning process.

It is of high relevance to the LAK community to explore blended learning scenarios where students can interact at diverse digital and physical learning spaces. This workshop aims to gather the sub-community of LAK researchers, learning scientists and researchers from other communities, interested in ubiquitous, mobile and/or face-to-face learning analytics. An overarching concern is how to integrate and coordinate learning analytics to provide continued support to learning across digital and physical spaces. The goals of the workshop are to share approaches and identify a set of guidelines to design and connect Learning Analytics solutions according to the pedagogical needs and contextual constraints to provide support across digital and physical learning spaces.

Recently, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been proposed as relevant instruments for professional development. This paper reports on two editions of the HANDSON MOOC for teacher professional development. The MOOCs use the Learning Design Studio methodology as a pedagogical framework, the Integrated Learning Design Environment (ILDE) as the design infrastructure, and Moodle and Canvas as delivery platforms. The paper summarizes the design of both MOOCs, including the supporting technologies, and presents an analysis of the evolution of teachers’ perceived level of conform with approach and tooling. Data is collected in weekly and final surveys. The results show a general satisfactory level of conform in both MOOCs, which is especially high the last two weeks.

Pervasive classroom environments with interconnected smart devices permit enacting diverse pedagogical models in education. This paper proposes an extensible architecture integrating smart display, smart phones and wearable devices to support flexible orchestration of dynamic collaborative learning activities in face-to-face educational scenarios. The paper motivates an architectural design and describes its main components based on existing systems like Signal Orchestration System (SOS) and a multi-screen cooperation middleware. An applicable scenario illustrates the usage of proposed architecture in which wearable devices are used to indicate orchestration mechanisms (group formation, change of activity), a shared display visualizes tasks with summary of the orchestration and activity progress for collective awareness and smart phones are used to interact with the shared display and complete the activities.

This paper presents a study designed to understand the effect of using a talking head in academic videos frequently used in video-based learning approaches, such Massive Open Online Courses. The experiment consisted of exposing participants to videos about different types of open software licenses. Each participant was exposed to 3 videos, each with a different condition: instructor always presented (talking head condition), only instructor's voice present (only audio condition), and instructor presented only at the beginning of the video (mixed condition). Dependent variables included cognitive load, and emotional states (valance and arousal) obtained with electroencephalography, a personal assessment of the difficulty of the material, personal opinion regarding the social presence and performance in a memory test. The results indicate an increase in the cognitive load in the mixed condition, which may have implications regarding the use of the talking head in the design of academic videos.

Recent research in the Game-Based Learning domain shows that location-based games can lead to positive effects in studentsâ?? motivation and engagement. However, the potential effectiveness of these approaches depends on to what extent their design is aligned with the requirements of specific educational situations. For this reason, involving teachers in the design of their own location-based learning games becomes crucial to fulfil their teaching requirements. This paper presents a metaphor based on puzzle boards as a technique to involve teachers in the design of their own location-based games. A design-based research methodology has been followed to evaluate the proposed metaphor. Previous research experiments have shown the feasibility of the puzzle-based games approach to allow secondary education teachers the design of these types of learning experiences. However, some issues in terms of understanding specific elements of the proposed metaphor were detected. A second iteration of the research methodology is described in the paper to evaluate the changes made to the definitions of the metaphorâ??s elements and the dynamics of the game design task. The evaluation is carried out with 20 primary and secondary education teachers who completed a paper-based design task. The main findings show that teachers did not have problems using the proposed metaphor and they successfully designed their own location-based learning games.

Previous research has shown that pedagogical patterns can inspire and support practitioners in the design of learning activities, including non-trivial Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) activities. This potential has led to a number of LD tooling initiatives supporting patterns: from pattern repositories to authoring tools that present the patterns as editable templates. However, these repositories and authoring tools are isolated and the patterns available in one tool are not easily transferable to another tool. In this paper, we propose a software architecture based on a pattern ontology focused on the specific case of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). Its objective is to support the dynamic management of patterns and enable its interoperable provision between tools. As proofs of concept, the paper demonstrates by means of use scenarios the relevance or the problem and the first implementations of the architecture.

Hint techniques are implemented in many digital game-based learning tools to support learning and engage students during the learning process. However, these hint techniques can be of different nature and affect students' behavior when interacting with the games. This paper aims to understand the effects of students' behavior while using two different hint techniques (visual and phrase) embedded in a game focused on teaching the main concepts of the periodic table of elements. The results, obtained through an evaluation with students in their first year of high school, reveal that students using the visual approach obtained more points with less clicks, while those using the phrase approach achieved less points with more clicks. Although these data may suggest a greater level of comprehension through the visual hints, a post-test revealed a trend showing that those who used the phrase hints achieved a greater score.

Educational games have been proved to be learning environments that are more in correspondence with new generation of students since they can provide successful learning and motivate students in their learning process. In this line, several studies describe the main factors that games should have in order to design engaging learning experiences. Taking into account these factors, this paper presents the design of three different game-based learning environments providing hints for puzzle solving different tasks within the area of computer architecture, programming fundamentals, and computing networks. An evaluation carried out with secondary and higher education students provides further considerations regarding the design of hints, score, and supportive learning material that should be taken into account when creating such kind of games.

ISiS and 4SPPIces are two conceptual models that support the design of blended learning scenarios and of the technological systems for their enactment taking the space (virtual and physical) into account. Despite of their similarities, these two models have been conceived to a different end, usage contexts and for different audiences. However, they can be used complementarily. As a work usage example, we model a third party science inquiry educational scenario with both ISiS and 4SPPIces. This exercise illustrates how, in a two-phases design process, both models can complement each other to support collaboration among practitioners and technicians in the design of technologically supported innovative blended learning scenarios taking into account the space.

Mobile technologies are currently being applied to facilitate the development of learning activities in diverse spaces beyond the classroom. Indoors and outdoors spaces are augmented with located digital Educational Resources (ER) through specific technologies that provide a sensory input to smart phones that can indicate position and, thus, enable located learning activities. The potentiality that smart phones have, make these devices adequate to facilitate the access to located ERs. This paper proposes four space-aware design factors (the space, the connectivity, the position-based technologies and the guidance) that have to be considered for designing located learning activities supported with smart phones. The application of the factors is explained through four illustrative located learning scenarios. The paper discusses and provides a wide-range vision of how the combination of these factors affects the design of the activity, accessing to the ERs and monitoring the students' progress.

Personal development plans (PDP) have positive effects in learnerspsila motivation and confidence since they enable individuals to reflect upon their own learning and to plan for their own educational development according to their personal interests, background and experience. Despite those benefits, there are not many efforts considering the role of learners in the creation of their own learning paths. In this paper we adopt the approach of concept mapping to propose and implement a visual approach for supporting learners in the exploration of existing learning paths and the creation of their PDP. The paper also describes a user study for preliminarily evaluating the implemented tool and discusses the most significant findings around three main issues of interest: understanding of the tool purpose, suitability of the graphic elements shown in the interface, and changes or additions that would improve the usability of the tool.

With the aim of visually supporting learners in the creation of their personal development plans, this paper describes the functionalities added to a preliminary approach for improving its usability and satisfying better the learnerspsila needs taking into account the findings from a previous user study.

The management of groups is an essential task in collaborative learning scenarios. In a blended learning situation, in which online activities and face-to-face activities are combined, this group management becomes more complex. Different technological solutions have been proposed for supporting the group management in the CSCL field. However, these approaches fail to consider factors inherent to the blended learning scenarios. In this paper we discuss and propose a conceptualization of the main factors that condition the group management in these scenarios: the pedagogical method, the participants, the space and the history. These new conceptualization may help on incorporating more flexibility and accuracy on the whole learning design process for a wide range of learning situations.

Scripts are the computational solution proposed in the computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) field to guide and support potentially fruitful interactions in terms of learning benefits. However, when applying these scripts to real contexts, unexpected situations occur that forces to change the script on the fly. In a blended learning situation, in which online activities and face-to-face activities are combined this changes becomes more complex. Different solutions and tools have been developed to provide support to collaborative practices. However, these systems are still too rigid to capture the unexpected changes and situations that can occur in educational contexts. Specialized and interoperable tools should be developed for supporting these changing situations, without spoiling natural group dynamics.

With the aim of facilitating teachers the use of good techniques in computer assisted assessment, this paper proposes the integration of rubric functionalities in an editor compliant with the IMS question and test interoperability specification (QTI). Teachers can organize the information of an e-questionnaire using the QTI-rubric approach. They can use (and reuse) QTI elements without having a technical background or knowledge of the specification. The QTI-rubric enables automatic formative feedback for learners and the results can serve them as a personal evidence of their knowledge and capabilities.

In line with the suggestions deriving from the new problem-solving approaches to ID, this paper points out the need of integrating formalized descriptions of good practices, such as Collaborative Learning Flow Patterns (CLFP) with other representations able to support unskilled designers in selecting and instantiating scripts, setting up effective collaborative groups and their “social structures”. Based on these premises, the paper analyzes a real course designed with the backing of a CLFP-based authoring tool for the creation of CSCL scripts and describes the support offered by the Social Structures Representations (SSRs) in selecting and reusing scripts.

Advances in educational technology have enabled new forms of organizing and managing collaborative learning environments. One of the currents trends in research on Technology Enhanced Learning is the application of computer-interpretable scenarios, such as those formalized with IMS Learning Design (IMSLD), for the description and deployment of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) scripts. The life-cycle of IMS-LD scripts involves several phases, from the conception to their enactment in actual learning situations. In the context of collaborative learning, group/roles management and composition have special relevance, and are in fact some of the tasks that the teacher must accomplish before students can follow the scripts. This paper presents a software tool (InstanceCollage) that implements a pattern-based approach, which has been previously validated for the task of script design. In this way, it aims at facilitating the population of roles and groups generally described in IMS-LD scripts.

With the aim of facilitating teachers the design of units of learning and assessment, this paper proposes the use of different educational pattern types. Depending on the type of patterns, the resulting didactic materials are specified using IMS Learning Design or IMS Question and Test Interoperability extended with integrated Web2.0-like services.

The success of Web 2.0 technologies in providing support for social interaction in educational spaces depends on how learning environments benefit from the affordances of Web 2.0 services. These services can be combined with the management of learning activities as done by IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) compliant systems. In this paper, we analyze the ability of an integrated system (blog, forum, and IMS LD activities) to instigate and support learner activity and interaction with other members of the learning network. This analysis takes the form of a case study in which a small professional learning community uses the integrated system. Four different aspects are studied in this case: The role of the tutor, the role of socially outgoing learners, the influence of the adopted educational approach, and the system's components. The paper explains how each of these aspects can play a role in augmenting learner activity and interaction, and consequently incrementing the success of learning systems.

This paper describes an approach for modeling and implementing a collaborative learning situation, which is part of a real lifelong learning scenario in astronomy. We adopt and slightly adjust IMS Learning Design for computationally representing the script so that collaborative tools can be satisfactorily employed. We use Collage editor, which enables the re-use of general structures proposed by Collaborative Learning Flow Patterns, for authoring the script and Gridcole system for executing it. The paper also shows the log-files produced by the employed tools. The teacher can use these log-files to monitor the evolution of the process for evaluation and regulation purposes.

This paper proposes collaborative learning flow patterns (CLFPs), which represent best practices in collaborative learning structuring, as a central element of a kind of bi-directional linkage that facilitates that teachers can play the role of designers influencing in the behavior of CSCL (computer-supported collaborative learning) technological solutions. Additionally, this paper describes a technological approach for achieving such a scenario. That approach is based on the Collage authoring tool that provides CLFPs as IMS LD templates and the Gridcole system, capable of interpreting the resulting CLFP-based LDs and integrating the service-oriented tools needed to support the (collaborative) learning activities as prescribed in those LDs

The use of patterns in e-learning is being recently proposed with different purposes and scopes. This paper provides a unifying view of several representative proposals in order to situate and introduce the types of patterns that can be used for generating collaboration scripts that are suitable of being computationally represented and interpreted by learning management systems (LMSs). The paper also presents a hierarchical structure that relates these patterns according to their focus and granularity. The structure shows how the different types of patterns are complementary and should be considered in the process of creating a script. In addition to authoring tools and LMSs, there are other types of tools in which the application of patterns may be useful. This paper points out these tools locating them along the "life cycle" of the scripts

Collaborative learning patterns (CLPs) are detailed descriptions of best practices in collaborative learning. These patterns provide a way for a representation of key aspects of CSCL (computer-supported collaborative learning) that is easy to understand by software developers. To formalize these CLPs we have focused our attention on IMS learning design (IMS-LD). IMS-LD provides a means of expressing many different pedagogical approaches (including collaborative learning), however we have found some limitations in reflecting learning experiences that are group-based. Although this specification supports multiple roles in a learning activity, it is not possible to specify how they are going to interact. This paper points out this deficiency and proposes an extension of IMS-LD. The process that can be followed in order to obtain a unit of learning based on a CLP is illustrated with an example.