Teaching programming for non-programmers is a difficult task for teachers. This manuscript describes an intervention designed to help students from Digital Humanities while learning R for text analysis. Intervention based on a peer review reported a good performance regarding supporting the students while learning R, providing them with adequate space to exchange ideas and good practices.

The increase in usage of online learning systems, has caused a renewed interest in using computers to provide more support to the student’s learning experiences, allow instructors to focus on activities that require human intervention, and enable courses with a large number of students to help them achieve the learning objectives. One experience that has been particularly complex to emulate in online environments is assignment grading. The grading cycle tends to be a weak point in the experience. Among its drawbacks, two main issues are potential turnaround time and that assignments tend to provide only one opportunity to show understanding of the course content. In the context of programming assignments, this experience is particularly problematic as the programming cycle tends to be an iterative process. This paper discusses the initial implementation of an automatic scoring and feedback system for programming assignments. The system includes feedback on syntax, semantics, and code structure. We explain the architecture of the system and the results of an experiment run with 20 students that shows the effects of the system. In the experiment, we observed that the feedback system improves student performance in the assignment as measured by the grade assigned to them.

Today’s education must offer multiple opportunities to address the individual needs of all students. In this context, educational innovation plays an important role in guiding the processes of creating strategies to achieve more inclusive learning and teaching. Many studies have analyzed the affordances of augmented reality, gamification, and the adoption of Universal Design for Learning as separate strategies to improve education. In turn, this paper presents the combination of these three strategies as a positive alternative to address diversity in the classroom. A gamified augmented educational application has been designed that considers the principles of Universal Design for Learning to teach robotics in secondary education. The results show the application facilitates the inclusion of students, improving the fulfillment of the academic challenges.

Augmented reality (AR) is an emerging technology that has been successfully integrated into education. However, the use of AR as a tool to achieve educational inclusion has not been deeply explored. This study introduces CooperAR, a methodology aimed at attending educational inclusion, understanding inclusion as a process where the needs of all students are taken into consideration. CooperAR focuses on the creation of AR-based learning scenarios, in which teachers and students become co-creators of content. The methodology is based on the principles of Universal Design for learning and the Cooperative Learning approach. The effectiveness of CooperAR was validated in the context of a case study that involved 66 students. The results showed promising results, suggesting that CooperAR is an efficient methodology to promote educational inclusion through cooperation.

Population growth implies the need to produce more food. This increases pressure on the planet's resources, which drives climate change and challenges environmental sustainability. Hence, it is important to promote sustainable agriculture strategies that contribute to global food and nutrition security while protecting natural resources. These strategies should be guided from an educational perspective that motivates people to develop positive bonds with nature. In this regard, augmented reality has emerged as a technology with the potential to improve environmental education programs. This paper presents the development and evaluation of an augmented reality-based educational application, whose purpose is to foster sustainable agriculture in the context of aquaponics. The application was developed using Unity and Vuforia following the principles of instructional design. To evaluate the effectiveness of the application, we designed a pilot study with 10 volunteers. The results indicate that the application has the potential to motivate users to learn, which suggests that it is appropriate to foster sustainable agriculture strategies in the context of aquaponics.

The use of ICT in the classroom has allowed new teaching strategies, including the use of interactive software. However, during the design and implementation of this type of software, existing standards or recommendations for the creation of accessible Web content are not taken into account. This is why the accessibility in Web content, specifically in educational context, has been the subject of much discussion regarding the need to make Web educational content accessible to all students, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. The present study makes a literature review to identify those Authoring Tools that are being used by teachers in the areas of exact sciences, emphasizing mathematics, physics and geometry. Subsequently, the Web content generated by the identified Authoring Tools is evaluated in compliance with WCAG 2.1 recommendations, with the purpose of enunciating some conclusions and next issues to research.

This paper presents aTenDerAH, a videogame designed to support e-Learning processes of young-adults students, especially those suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). aTenDerAH was developed using Unity as the cross-platform game engine and development tool, Cinema 4D for creating models and animations in 3D, and Photoshop for creating textures to the 3D models. The videogame was integrated into the architecture of Atutor e-learning platform to carry out a case study of the perception of aTenDerAH from the point of view of a student suffering from ADHD, a student without this syndrome and a teacher. Participants agreed on being satisfied with the tool goals and the positive influence of the videogame in the learning process.

The creation of Inclusive and Accessible Open Educational Resources (IA-OERs) is a challenge for teachers because they have to invest time and effort to create learning contents considering students' learning needs and preferences. An IA-OER is characterized by its alignment with the Universal Design Learning (UDL) principles, the quality on its contents and the web accessibility as a way to address the diversity of students. Creating an IA-OER with these characteristics is not a straightforward task, especially when teachers do not have enough information/feedback to make decisions on how to improve the learning contents. In this paper we introduce ATCE - an Analytics Tool to Trace the Creation and Evaluation of IA-OERs. This tool focuses in particular on the accessibility and quality of the IA-OERs. ATCE was developed as a module within the ATutor Learning Management System (LMS). An analytics dashboard with visualizations related to the teachers' competences in the creation and evaluation of IA-OERs was included as part of the tool. This paper also presents a use case of the visualizations obtained from the creation and evaluation of one IA-OER after using our analytics tool.

Recent studies argue that Augmented Reality Game-Based Learning (ARGBL) benefit learning and teaching processes. However, creating and leveraging ARGBL experiences is not easy for teachers, since they lack the expertise and time to design and construct them. Using Co Design strategies that combine the expertise of different actors in the creation can solve this. In this paper, we introduce Co-CreARGBL method as a strategy for co designing ARGBL learning experiences involving teachers and designers as well. The method proposes a set of stages, activities and considerations. We also describe an ongoing field experience held with teachers implementing the proposed method with promising results.

Inclusiveness, namely the process of proving all learners equal educational opportunities, is a major challenge for many educational systems worldwide. In order to address this issue, frameworks have been proposed from (a) a pedagogical perspective such as the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and (b) teachers' required competences perspective such as the Competence Framework for Inclusive Teachers (CFIT). To this end, the scope of this paper is to present the design and initial evaluation of a teacher professional development program for designing inclusive learning experiences aligned with UDL and CFIT.

Nowadays, teachers and students continue to face the problem to find high quality learning objects for learning and teaching. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an innovative approach, which considers Item Response Theory (IRT) for recommending to students or teachers Learning Objects (LOs) of high quality in the context of the Learning Objects Economy, which is a marketplace for sharing and reuse of LOs. Recommendations provide to teachers or students the needed support for finding high quality learning objects taking advantage of the previous quality evaluations carry out by peers. An evaluation of our approach was carried out in a real scenario which allowed us to verify the applicability of the process for generating good recommendations.

Implications on a simultaneous application of Augmented Reality (AR) and Digital Game Based Learning (DGBL) to inclusive learning have yet to be observed. We designed an AR enriched videogame for Logical Math Skills Learning. Then we tested the game with a set of 20 students with diverse learning needs. Our experiment showed that the performance on the game is similar for kids with different needs. The results and feedback from teaching staff suggest that AR and DGBL allow the integration of children with special needs in the learning process.

Nowadays, many web content editors allow teachers to create web content as learning objects; however, most of these editors do not generate accessible web content. In many cases, the generated web content is not in accordance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). As a result, teachers and students with disabilities, e.g. people with visual impairment, people with hearing impairment, among others, could not properly use the web content in their learning or teaching processes. Moreover, some automatic tools for accessibility evaluation do not evaluate the web content using all the criteria from the guidelines; the rest are usually evaluated by humans (manual evaluation). In this paper, we introduce a tool to support accessibility evaluation in the generated web content when teachers use the TinyMCE web content editor. In this manner, we help them to identify web accessibility failures that can be improved. We also introduce a new approach for the web content accessibility manual evaluation process by applying the Case Based Reasoning technique. This work has been developed in the context of the European funded ALTER-NATIVA Project.

Assessment process in one of the most important issues in the learning process and in many cases it is the process that define the sequence of the instruction because it measures the performance of the student in the educational process. In last decades the inclusion of TICs in teaching-learning process has facilitated to address the diversity of students and teachers features. Learning technologies enhance have permitted to adapt the different ways of learning and teaching that coexist in the educational context through the generation of adaptations process as well as user modeling process. This paper describes the item response theory and how it can be applied in a test scenario of an online course for the generation of adaptive assessments within a course of introduction to Object Oriented Programming from items (assessment questions), which are available in online repositories. Being a probabilistic theory the article describes the variables to consider and how to calculate the probability that a student answers correctly a specific item, which is known as the student proficiency level or theta, based on a skill test and their previous answers. In other papers write for the authors it is described the experience of working with fedora commons repositories, which are distributed across a network, in order to have enough questions to be applied properly normalized in the adaptation process. These questions are described under the Dublin Core standard. The main contributions of this project are the implementation of a probabilistic theory in the generation of adaptive assessment and use of distributed repositories that allow the reusability of items properly parameterized. A second phase of the research includes the implementation of the project (APIP) Accessible Profile Portable Item, allowing standardization of assessment items in a suitable format in the LOM.

Nowadays there is a large and increasing body of learning objects stored on the Web. Some of them reside in different learning repositories, such as the MERLOT repository [1], the Education Network Australia (EDNA) [2], and the Connexions repository [3]. Fedora is an acronym for Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture [4]. Fedora's flexibility makes it capable of serving as a digital repository for a variety of use cases, including digital asset management, institutional repositories, digital archives, content management systems, scholarly publishing enterprises and digital libraries [5]. Many universities and companies around the world are using Fedora as a valid approach to manage their increasing knowledge. This document proposes an extension of the Fedora Commons repository which is composed by: A web editing module based on the ISO/IEC 24751-3 Digital Resource Description (DRD) [6] standard in order to label learning objects from the Fedora repository to provide them with accessible characteristics and on the other hand a web editing module to label learning objects from the Fedora Repository based on the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) [7] standard. Our approach offers institutions the possibility of labelling their learning objects in an accessible way, in order to facilitate the process of delivering the educational resources and the adaptive instructional design adjusted to the special needs of users. Our approach offers institutions the possibility of labelling their learning objects in an accessible way, in order to facilitate the process of delivering an adaptive instructional design adjusted to the special needs of users.

This paper introduce LORSE, a multiagent system based on JADE (Java Agents Development Framework) to support teachers and students in the time consuming task of searching for distributed learning objects in several learning objects repositories such as MERLOT, Connexions and Fedora Commons Repositories, It offers them the possibility of developing this task in the context of a learning management system. LORSE consist of a set of intelligent agents, whose responsibility it is to deliver to users different learning objects in response to specific searches requested by the users. The agents connect with the repositories by means of RESTful web services clients developed as one of its behaviors and then they develop the searches over the learning objects metadata to provide a suitable response to users. The integration process of LORSE with the dotLRN platform is presented and some implementations results are introduced.

The assessment process is one of the most important issues in the learning process and in many case it is the process that defines the instruction sequence because it measures the performance of the student in the educational process. During recent decades the inclusion of TICs in the teaching-learning process have facilitated addressing the diversity of student and teacher features. Technologies to enhance learning have allowed the different ways of learning and teaching that coexist in the educational context to be adapted through user modeling and adaptation processes. Our purpose in this paper is to introduce “. IRTT” (item response theory tool), an adaptive tool based on item response theory to generate assessment according to the student competence level, in the context of a learning management system (LMS), in particular. LRN [2].

In the context of virtual learning environments, it is difficult to find proposals addressing both problems at the same time, user modeling and adaptation processes based on learning styles. In particular, for the teachers, these processes require huge amounts of time and effort in the course construction, which most of the times is not recognized by the educational institutions. The main issue discussed in this paper is the creation of a dynamic user model based on learning styles (LS) to enrich and to support the automatic generation of an adaptive IMS learning design (LD) in order to reduce the amount of time and efforts for teachers providing learners with personalized learning experiences.

This paper presents an approach to adapt a playful space and an organizational space in Learning Management Systems to support virtual learning in adults with ADHD. The playful space consists of an adaptive videogame and some computer exercises that attempt to train cognitive areas deficient in people with ADHD, providing at the same time a strategy to motivate students. The organizational space attempts to facilitate students' work by presenting organized folders to remind them of the status of their tasks. These spaces will be automatically adapted according to each student's ADHD symptomatic profile inferred by a user modeling approach. This user modelling considers four user characteristics, which can also be used as variables in different contexts. These variables are: behavioral management, cognitive performance, emotional recognition, and emotional regulation. To infer the ADHD symptomatic profile of students and their emotional alterations, these features are used as input in a set of classification rules. The proposed user model provides the information to adapt the workspace of students with attention problems, specifically adult students with ADHD.

A set of new types of assessment is required for learning management systems (LMSs), and there is a need for a way to assess lifelong adaptive competencies. Proposed solutions to these problems need to preserve the interoperability, reusability, efficiency and abstract modeling already present in LMSs. This paper introduces a set of software tools for an author assessment package on the LMS Mooddle being developed as part of adaptive e-learning engine architecture (AEEA). The principal features of this set are: 1) The set avoid editing items for a 360-degree feedback evaluation, 2) Whole items and tests are linked to levels of competencies acquisition, 3) The competency-based e-assessment data model are based on e-learning specification and complemented with XML data on the appraised competencies, 4) Items and tests are storage in repositories, and 5) The tools are integrated within Moodle to facilitate the design of an assessment plan.

Active modeling is required in learning settings to cope with the dynamic evolution of the knowledge, since learners competences evolves over time as they participate in the course activities. Moreover, one of the main issues in a competence based eLearning process is to deliver personalized instructional designs adjusted to both 1) intrinsic characteristics of users (i.e. learning styles) and 2) the desired and achieved competences in the learning process (i.e. specific and generic competences). This delivery includes the adaptation of the content and the activities in a learning scenario based on a dynamic user model that evolves according to user interactions. In this paper, an approach to support Conditional Plans Generation (IMS Learning Designs) in the context of a virtual learning environment is presented. The process is supported by a pervasive usage of standards and specifications (IMS family of specifications) in conjunction with an integral user modeling.