As we move from the Information Age to the Intelligence Age, universities must redefine themselves taking into account recent challenges. Two of these challenges are Micro-credentials and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Micro-credentials certify the learning outcomes of short-term learning experiences, which are typically more flexible and tailored to specific, job-relevant skills, meeting the increasing demand for continuous education. These learning experiences are normally referred to as micro-credential courses or micro-credential programs and disrupt traditional degree models. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence is disrupting every single aspect of our life and work. Artificial Intelligence tools can work as assistants helping in all kinds of tasks that were previously reserved for humans. Artificial Intelligence can be used in education in many ways, such as to create personalized learning paths, create and optimize educational multimedia content such as text, voice, image, or video, tutor students, and monitor student progress in real-time, contributing to the acquisition of learning outcomes. Putting the two challenges together, Artificial Intelligence can also contribute to generate micro-credentials by ensuring learners demonstrate competence in practical, job-specific skills, enhancing their credibility for employers. Therefore, Artificial Intelligence can playa pivotal role in advancing micro-credential courses and programs, helping universities redefine their offerings to provide personalized, adaptable, and industry-relevant learning experiences. Artificial Intelligence can help in designing the content and the learning experience as with courses in general, but it can also help in designing the specificities of micro-credential courses. The specific “skills” provided by Artificial Intelligence for defining micro-credentials range from clerical work related to mastering formats such as ELM or OpenBadges that are needed to construct digital credentials to creative sug-gestions that aid in designing the details of the micro-credential course. Alternatively, the micro-credentials designed can include topics about Artificial Intelligence, helping the workforce on this important area. This paper analyzes the interplay of these two challenges and how they can help each other, making opportunities out of challenges.

The possible applications of GenAI (Generative AI) in education alone are so manyfold and overwhelming that it is useful to have an overview of the many possibilities that are opening up. In this paper, we try to organize some of the low-hanging fruits that can help instructors, learners, and educational managers use GenAI applications to improve educational performance. For instructors, GenAI can help in gaining a deeper understanding of the topics to be taught, preparing educational materials, and facilitating the enactment phase in class. Learners can be assisted in getting personalized content and feedback, having GenAI as a participant in forums, or for self-reflection and emotions detection. Managers and other stakeholders can profit from Academic Analytics, bias detection, course repurposing, and many other uses. In this paper, we also present a use case detailing some initial actions we are implementing for a Programming with Java course. One action is to explicitly identify, in each problem set, the competencies being developed. Another one is the development of a chatbot, fine-tuned with the course material, which can be used by students as a tutor. The third action is to use a GenAI tool to generate questions aimed at assessing whether students truly grasp the programming project they have supposedly developed. AI is here to stay, in spite of the issues it opens up, and therefore it is never too early to start experimenting with it in practice.

If learning at the side of the student is important, it is also recognition of the learning happened. This occurs at different levels and through different instruments. It can be informal, for motivation purposes or formal, to show outside. In this paper, we analyse the concept of recognition from several vantage points.

There are many applications that help orchestrate face-to-face, online, or hybrid classes through the cloud. Examples are polling apps like Wooclap or Mentimeter, digital boards like Jamboard or Miro, or diagramming tools like diagrams.net, Coggle, or Kialo. However, one can go one step further and integrate some of these tools in order to use the most appropriate tool for each teaching moment and have information flow across tools preserving consistency without having to do this manually. In this paper, we present a specific experience and extrapolate it to highlight the power of programming the teaching interaction.

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of society, and in particular of university teaching. Professors who were reluctant or unwilling to take advantage of what digital technologies offered suddenly were forced to teach with technologies. In this paper, we describe teaching during the two main phases during the pandemic at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M): the first phase during the complete lockdown and the second where students were allowed on campus with limitations. We also explain how the investment done during these two phases influences teaching in the future and how digital cloud-based technologies promote active learning at the university.

Time management strategies and self-regulated learning have received much attention. Nevertheless, there is a lack of research in terms of student self-awareness related to their own self-regulation and autonomy. This study aims to validate whether students are self-conscious about their working patterns and their time management. In order to do so, several parameters like work sessions regularity or invested time have been computed and analyzed. This invested time is measured thanks to a data-gathering tool that collects events generated by students. Results show that students are, in general, self-aware of their own working patterns and that the regularity of their weekly work time is correlated with their final marks.

Interfaces are what separates us from the tools we use. Interfaces are presently becoming more natural and human-oriented. We are moving from keyboard-oriented tools to those that exploit other human senses, such as sight and sound. In this paper, we explore how voice recognition and generation, augmented reality, and unperceivable sensors help in making educational technology more invisible.

Technology is advancing at an ever-increasing speed. The backend capabilities and the frontend means of interaction are revolutionizing all kinds of applications. In this paper, we analyze how the technological breakthroughs seem to make educational interactions look smarter and more human. After defining Education 4.0 following the Industry 4.0 idea, we identify the key breakthroughs of the last decade in educational technology, basically revolving around the concept cloud computing, and imagine a new wave of educational technologies supported by machine learning that allows defining educational scenarios where computers interact and react more and more like humans.

Education has undergone numerous changes over the last few years. The number and variety of technologies that can be used now to access education and enrich teaching and learning scenarios, as well as the number and variety of people that are connected to education entail that we face increasingly complex educational settings. This paper reflects on different aspects of current education and how these relate to multiple factors, which lead to the definition of multi-education. To this end, several terms related to multi-education, such as multi-media, multi-channel, multi-scale, multi-modal, and multi-intelligence will be analyzed, presenting related works, and trying to find out where we are heading.

Forum messages in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are the most important source of information about the social interactions happening in these courses. Forum messages can be analyzed to detect patterns and learners' behaviors. Particularly, sentiment analysis (e.g., classification in positive and negative messages) can be used as a first step for identifying complex emotions, such as excitement, frustration or boredom. The aim of this work is to compare different machine learning algorithms for sentiment analysis, using a real case study to check how the results can provide information about learners' emotions or patterns in the MOOC. Both supervised and unsupervised (lexicon-based) algorithms were used for the sentiment analysis. The best approaches found were Random Forest and one lexicon based method, which used dictionaries of words. The analysis of the case study also showed an evolution of the positivity over time with the best moment at the beginning of the course and the worst near the deadlines of peer-review assessments.

The learning process in a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) can be improved from knowing in advance learners’ grades on different assignments. This would be very useful to detect problems with enough time to take corrective measures. In this work, the aim is to analyse how different course scores can be predicted, what elements or variables affect the predictions and how much and in which way it is possible to anticipate scores. To do that, data from a MOOC about Java programming have been used. Results show the importance of indicators over the algorithms and that forum-related variables do not add power to predict grades, unlike previous scores. Furthermore, the type of task can vary the results. Regarding the anticipation, it was possible to use data from previous topics but with worse performance, although values were better than those obtained in the first seven days of the current topic.

The MOOC movement has helped faculty in focusing on how to lecture. However, once this is done, it would not make sense not to use this content for on-campus classes. In this paper, we will explain how to harness top content created for MOOCs to improve on-campus classes, where the personal interaction is a key added feature. Interactive practices and on-site interaction, especially in-class interaction, are of particular relevance in the evolution of Higher Education towards a more effective learning.

The appearance of MOOCs has contributed to the use of educational technology in new contexts. As a consequence, many teachers face the challenge of creating educational content (courseware) to be offered in MOOCs. Although some best practices exist, it is true that most of the content is being developed without much thought about adequacy, reusability, maintainability, composability, etc. The main thesis at this paper is that we are facing a "courseware crisis" in the same way as there was a "software crisis" 50 years ago, and that the way out is to identify good engineering discipline to aid in the development of courseware. We need Courseware Engineering in the same way as at those times we needed Software Engineering. Therefore, the challenge is now to define and develop fundamentals, tools, and methods of Courseware Engineering, as an analogy to the fundamentals, tools, and methods that were developed in Software Engineering.

The emergence of MOOCs has boosted the use of educational technology in all possible contexts. How can MOOC affordances, such as rich multimedia content, interactive exercises, and social networks, be harnessed in face-to-face education? In this paper, we present some experiences carried out at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid that combine MOOC-like content in on-campus courses. We believe that this is the most promising and useful way to use the affordances of technology in education.

This paper summarizes some of the work that has been carried out within the eMadrid research network in the last four years in the area of educational technology at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. In order to organize the findings and identify future trends and possibilities, a framework space is used with three dimensions: physical-digital, local-global, and formal-informal. Research results are presented along the three dimensions and possible future developments are suggested in this framework.

SUMMARY During the last decade, the number of distributed application domains with temporal requirements has significantly augmented, arising the necessity of exploring new concepts and paradigms that allow, on the one hand, the development of dynamic and flexible distributed applications and, on the other hand, the reusability of code. Service‐oriented paradigms have been successfully applied to distributed environments, increasing their flexibility and allowing the reusability of their components. Besides, distributed real‐time Java technologies have shown to be a good candidate to deploy real‐time distributed applications. This paper presents a model for service‐oriented applications on a time‐triggered distributed real‐time Java environment, focusing on the definition of the temporal model of an application and its schedulability, applying and evaluating this model in real‐time service‐oriented composition algorithms. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

SUMMARY OSGi was designed with embedded systems in mind, its current support is insufficient for coping with one main characteristic of many embedded systems: real‐time performance. This article analyzes different key issues in providing OSGi with real‐time Java performance covering motivational issues, and different integration ways and challenges stemming from the integration. It also contributes a general framework for introducing real‐time performance in OSGi, which is called the real‐time for OSGi framework. The framework uses real‐time Java virtual machines and the real‐time specification for Java. The adoption of this framework allows cyber‐physical systems to experience real‐time Java performance in their applications. The framework introduces several integration levels for OSGi and real‐time specification for Java, and specific real‐time OSGi services. An empirical implementation was carried out using standard software, which was extended with the new defined services. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract The current RTSJ (Real‐Time Specification for Java) threading model is dualized: a programmer has to decide between the high predictability offered by the region‐based model and the flexibility offered by the garbage collection. So far, there is no unique type of thread which offers both the high predictability of a non‐heap thread and the flexibility of a real‐time thread in a single entity. Furthermore, this lack has a serious impact on the programmer who has to deal with new and sometimes non‐trivial to use mechanisms, such as specific queues of objects or new types of threads, in order to avoid the priority inversion caused by the garbage collector. In order to tackle the concern properly and provide an improved and more generalized programming model, the authors propose a simple extension to the current threading model namedRealtimeThread++, in an attempt to introduce more flexibility in the RTSJ concurrency model. The paper describes the extension from several points of view: (i) the programmer, identifying scenarios that may benefit from it significantly; (ii) the real‐time Java technology perspective, identifying changes required in the current real‐time virtual machine to support it; and (iii) the accumulated experience, relating empirical results obtained from a software prototype that supports the extension. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract The proliferation of a new generation of distributed real‐time embedded systems (DRE) characterized by special restrictions on its storage capacities, its available computation time, and the messages they can send through the network suggests a comprehensive redesign of the current distribution infrastructure in order to tune its performance. In this changing panorama, the paper concerns one of the protocols, Java's Remote Method Protocol (JRMP), used nowadays to interconnect different nodes of a distributed Java system, and explores the cost of integrating an improved protocol‐level multiplexing strategy in the context of an end‐to‐end remote invocation. The new multiplexing strategy helps middleware manage more efficiently unscheduled invocations that appear at runtime generated from a certain client node, especially in cases where preallocation of resources or dimensioning for the worst‐case are techniques not plausible. To this end, the paper examines an alternative based on the definition of a new subprotocol, called ConnectionLess, which offers built‐in multiplexing facilities for distributed Java applications. The performance of the new subprotocol is compared against the three already defined by JRMP (namely SingleOp, Stream, and Multiplex), taking into consideration parameters such as memory consumed in the Java's virtual machine and end‐to‐end response times. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract Service‐based approach has been successfully applied to distributed environments, modelling them as pieces of functionality that exchange information by means of messages in order to achieve a common goal. The advantages of this approach can be also be applied to distributed real‐time systems, increasing their flexibility and allowing the creation of new brand applications from existing services in the system. If this is an online process, then time‐bounded composition algorithms are needed to not jeopardize the performance of the whole system. Different composition algorithms are studied and proposed, two of them optimal and another two based on heuristics. This paper presents an analytical solution that selects, depending on the structure of the application and on the load of the whole system, the most suitable composition algorithm to be executed in order to obtain a composed application in bounded time. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

SUMMARY Many real‐time systems use preemptive priority‐based scheduling in their internals to guarantee certain real‐time performance. This includes technologies that range from The Real‐Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) to middleware like Real‐Time Common Object Request Broker Architecture (RT‐CORBA), which offers additional models and policies that blend client and server information. This decision eases the integration of real‐time admission tests and dispatching policies in these types of infrastructures. In this paper, we analyze different trade‐offs that emerge from the definition of different propagation models for distributed real‐time Java. The paper covers technological integration aspects as impact on interfaces and other practical issues mainly related to the performance that this model offers to a real‐time application and non‐functional overhead. The contribution described in the paper may help in the development of The Distributed Specification for Java (DRTSJ). Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

More-and-more, the use of Java as a programming language for real-time applications is becoming of interest in industrial middleware. This is mainly because it offers advantages for the programmer as reduced deployment times, increased portability, and a number of APIs that may be integrated in large distributed applications. This paper contributes a dual communication model for distributed real-time Java applications. Current efforts in distributed real-time Java [e.g., The Distributed Real Time Specification for Java (DRTSJ)] are mainly focused on remote invocations (R.I.) and set aside other valuable approaches such as distributed events. The proposed model offers two choices for developing distributed real-time Java applications (one based on R.I., and another on distributed events), which may be used to develop applications. Both models include an additional support for asynchronism in communications, a feature that may speed up their communication performance. This paper includes a description for the two models, the changes that are required in the current API to accommodate them, and an empirical evaluation of their performance on a reference implementation.

Today's trend in real-time systems reveals the necessity of new technologies to easy their development and maintenance. Among others, some interesting alternatives are found in high-level real-time programming languages, better development models, or simple architectures and models. From the perspective of real-time Java, a recent real-time programming language, this paper offers an architecture (and its corresponding Java interfaces) to help the development of an upcoming distributed real-time technology for Java (named DRTSJ). To that end it describes a neutral architecture based on Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and The Real-time Specification for Java (RTSJ). The empirical evidences included in the paper offer also interesting clues on the performance this technology may deliver.

The increasing complexity of networked embedded systems (NES) brings in the vision of large-scale systems made of subparts with decoupled interaction. In highly decoupled environments, it is required to introduce software paradigms that adjust well to this degree of independence among subsystems. In modern NES, real-time properties and reconfiguration facilities are not only an added value but an unavoidable trend that research is currently focusing at. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are an easy-to-understand natural means to provide such decoupled model of operation; service-based applications are made of a set of self-contained pieces of functionality (services) that cooperate by exchanging messages to provide the application's common goal. This paper presents a middleware architecture that includes real-time support for service-oriented NES. The architecture includes the fundamental set of functions to support timely service-based composition and execution. The architecture is the core part of the iLAND project that aims at supporting deterministic service-based composition and reconfiguration in service-based NES. The architecture can be built on top standard communication middleware cores (as DDS or RT-CORBA), since it supports synchronous and asynchronous communication models. An experimental set up for real-time video transmission has been developed to validate it.

Many real-time systems use preemptive priorities in their internals to guarantee certain real-time performance. This includes technologies that range from RTSJ (The Real-Time Specification for Java) to middleware like Real-Time CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) which offers additional models and policies that blend client and server information. This decision makes easier the integration of real-time acceptance tests and dispatching policies in these kinds of infrastructures. In this paper, we analyze different tradeoffs that emerge from the definition of different propagation models for distributed real-time Java. The paper covers technological integration aspects, impact on interfaces, and other practical issues more related to the performance that this model offers to a real-time application

This article presents an approach to providing real-time support for Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and its integration with the RTSJ memory model in order to leave out garbage collection. A new construct for remote objects, called No-heap Remote object ( NhRo ), is introduced. The use of a NhRo guarantees that memory required to perform a remote invocation (at the server side) does not use heap memory. Thus, the aim is to avoid garbage collection in the remote invocation process, improving predictability and memory isolation of distributed Java-based real-time applications. The article presents the bare model and the main programming patterns that are associated with the NhRo model. Sun RMI implementation has been modified to integrate the NhRo model in both static and dynamic environments.

Current trends in real-time systems identify Java as a new alternative to develop both centralized and distributed real-time systems. Many efforts have been devoted to develop the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ), and there is substantial ongoing activity to produce a straightforward and valuable Distributed Real-Time Specification for Java (DRTSJ). The current paper provides a contribution to this latter activity defining, from different angles, a synchronous scheduling service aligned with principles of some popular real-time architectures. This service orchestrates the system in such a way that it provides end-to-end guarantees in the distributed transactions, guaranteeing their timely execution across the network and nodes. The service is described from two points of view: the system one, characterizing a portable model; and the programmer one, defining a distributed object-oriented implementation of a model based on Real-Time Remote Method Invocation (RTRMI). Finally, it also presents results of an implementation carried out to judge the efficiency of the service, offering a preliminary predictability and performance assessment of a distributed real-time Java technology.

More and more, the use of real-time distribution middlewares programmed with high-level languages like Java is becoming of interest for industrial systems because this type of infrastructures reduce development efforts required to both design and maintain complex networked applications. In that way towards having better development tools, this paper deals with the very specific issue of the asynchronism from the particular perspective of Java's distributed technologies. It proposes and evaluates an extension to the Java's remote method invocation (RMI) with additional support for asynchronous remote invocations. Such a mechanism makes the transmission of some messages, typically those that do not require any confirmation from the server, much more efficient than synchronous communications, and consequently they optimize and speed up the performance of many industrial networked applications. In more detail, this paper concerns with the model itself and the set of changes it requires within their middleware programming interfaces and inside communication protocols to accommodate the proposed model. The proposal is supported by empirical evidences from a prototype developed as partial proof-of-concept.

This paper presents a model for quality-of-service (QoS)-aware service composition in distributed systems with real-time and fault-tolerance requirements. This model can be applied in application domains like, for example, remote monitoring, control and surveillance. Classic approaches to real-time systems do not provide the flexibility and fault-tolerance required in new emerging environments that need to combine a high degree of dynamism with temporal predictability. Our approach addresses these new challenges by combining concepts from the service oriented paradigm and distributed real-time systems. We propose a concrete system model based on a holistic time-triggered-based approach for design and configuration. Based on this model, we propose two algorithms for the composition of QoS-aware service-based applications with temporal requirements: an exhaustive algorithm that computes the optimal service combination in terms of a figure of merit, suitable for offline composition; and an improved algorithm based on heuristics and partial figures of merit, suitable for online composition. Experimental results show that the latter reduces dramatically the number of combinations explored with a minimal degradation in the quality of the solution, making it feasible for online execution in dynamic environments.

Current RTSJ (The Real-Time Specification for Java) threading model is dualized: programmers have to decide between the high predictability offered by its region-based model and the flexibility offered by its garbage-collected model. Up to now, there is not a unique type of thread that offers, in a single entity, the highest predictability, and flexibility together. This lack has serious consequences on the programmer who has to deal with new and sometimes non-trivial mechanisms, such as queues of objects or the No-heap Real-Time Threads, to avoid the priority inversion caused by the garbage collector. In order to tackle these issues and provide an improved and more generalized programming model, the authors propose an extension to the current threading model that unifies the RTSJ threading model: the RealtimeThread++ extension.

Recently, the application domains where the development of systems with temporal guarantees is needed have increased. The majority of such domains are dynamic environments where the classical design approach is no longer applicable since it is too pessimistic. Thus, new challenges arise to adapt the current methodologies used in different architectural levels to these new environments. New directions and paradigms are needed to allow combining functional flexibility and dynamism with temporal predictability. The current work addresses these new challenges through the exploration of the applicability of concepts from the service oriented paradigm to distributed real-time systems. We propose a concrete system model based on a holistic time-triggered-based approach for design and configuration. Based on this model, we analyse the architectural entities required for two different architectural design approaches: static, when no reconfigurations at run-time are admitted, and dynamic, when these reconfigurations are possible. An exhaustive composition algorithm is also proposed.

Recently, new trends in application development for distributed platforms, such as the composable services model, attempt to provide more flexibility in system design, deployment and execution. Such trends, and particularly the referred composable services model, can also be beneficial in real-time distributed embedded systems, also providing a means to support more adaptive behaviors, reacting to the execution environment or coping with system reconfiguration. This paper explores a relatively new direction, which is the extension of the service-based model to dynamic, i.e. at run-time, composition in real-time distributed environments, in order to support the level of flexibility and adaptibility referred above. The paper proposes an architecture to support such dynamic service composition that is based on the flexible time triggered communication paradigm (FTT).To achieve the desired goal, we also redefine the concepts of service and service-based application in the concept of the FTT paradigm. Finally, we show experimental results obtained with a prototype implementation of the proposed architecture that confirm its feasibility and good temporal behavior

This paper describes an approach towards the definition and implementation of a synchronization service on top of a remote object model offered by an unicast real-time remote object paradigm. Also an architecture model based on the RTSJ (real-time specification for Java) and the distribution middleware RMI (remote method invocation) specifications is proposed in order to give support to the model, defining a convergence layer that manages the underlying resources involved in a master-slave communication through a new API. Finally, preliminary results from an implementation prototype show the feasibility of the model and provide an initial estimation of jitters and the performance of the synchronization service

This paper presents a memory management solution for distributed real-time Java. The proposed model is targeted at distributed applications that require to keep their internal state and that consume a bounded memory size in their operation. The aim is to provide an alternative to the garbage collector for distributed real-time systems and to avoid the penalties it introduces. The approach is based on the usage of scoped memory defined in the real-time specification for Java (RTSJ). Our solution introduces constraints in the programming model and in the current distributed Java architecture. However, these are compensated by eliminating the dependency of the garbage collector in the end-to-end invocation and by achieving self-cleaning with respect to the memory consumed by remote invocations.