Microelectronics is an essential component of virtually all aspects of our daily lives. The microelectronics sector in Europe is responsible directly 200,000 and indirectly 1,000,000 high-skilled jobs and the demand for new skills is increasing. In this scenario, ECoVEM project, European Centre of Vocational Excellence in Microelectronics, is a continuing work, based on an existing model for business-education collaboration of the Knowledge Alliance MECA and Sector Skills Alliance in Microelectronics, both targeting tertiary education. The ECoVEM project platform targets vocational excellence on all levels of European Qualification Framework. This project aims to establish a transnational cooperation platform of Vocational Excellence in Microelectronics to tackle the challenges of the: digitalization, artificial intelligence, green technologies, gender equality, and integration of migrants among others. One of these mechanisms is based on develop innovative VET curricula through Massive Open Online Courses. professional online courses serve as catalysts for individual and collective growth, driving innovation, sustainability, and inclusivity within our workforce. They empower individuals to adapt to new challenges, seize opportunities, and contribute meaningfully to their fields, ultimately fostering a more dynamic and resilient workforce for the future.

This paper describes the organization and results of several MOOCs delivered about technical topics (i.e., digital electronics, VHDL design on FPGAs, open education and OERs repositories and the use of STEAM technologies to encourage diversity and inclusion), where online laboratories have been used in some of them. An analysis of the enrollment, students participating on tasks or quizzes, drop-out rate and certifications requests have been done.

This paper discusses the potential of ChatGPT as an assistant to help with natural English paper writing for non-native English speakers. And how if used in an honest way, it can be an educational tool with great potential and not just a plagiarism aid.

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents a pilot test framed in educational robotics where parents and child work together during the same session. In recent years, an educational movement has emerged that is related to the introduction of computational thinking, programming, and robotics in schools. Educational robotics is presented as one more resource that serves as a support in the different curricular subjects and facilitates the emergence of skills such as socialization, creative spirit and personal initiative, allowing participants to find answers to the problems that may arise in their reality. It is for this reason that a pilot test was carried out where we included the participants' parents in a session. To do this we used the Crumble controller, a platform that is programmed using block programming language. This platform also allows making electrical connections in an amazingly simple way. From the mechanical point of view, we use materials that can be easily machined, both by children and by inexperienced people. At the end of the experience, the assistants completed the assembly of their own robot. The article contains a study of the state of the art of using educational robotics. It also includes an analysis of the different tools mostly used in educational robotics. Also, throughout the article the learning methodology used, the different educational resources and the results obtained from the experience are described.

Computational Thinking is a competence that is developed more in the last few years. This is due to the multitude of benefits it has in the classroom. Throughout this article we show a series of activities that promote the development of Computational Thinking using tools that allow visual block programming. The particularity of these activities is that some of them were performed during the confinement due to the COVID-19 and other activities were performed later, in the period known as the new normality. Throughout the article, details are provided about the different sessions. The different visual programming tools by blocks and the educational scenarios used are also indicated. In addition, the results obtained are shown.

Industry 4.0 is changing not only the way we interact with the world but the way the world communicates with us. Consequently, the term Industry 4.0 implies changes in all the lays of society. Education is an area affected in two ways, how educational curriculum needs to be updated in order to satisfy demands from students, market and society and, as any other area, adapt workforce and infrastructures. In other words, educational institutions must adapt both processes, services and products. In this scenario, online laboratories, also known as web-based laboratories or non-traditional laboratories, emerge as an essential tool for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) areas. Online laboratories have become a very common tool in educational institutions through the last decade based on their anywhere and anytime availability premise. This fact has shown its relevance even more due to covid19 crisis: Online laboratories have been a crucial tool to provide practical activities. However, online laboratories are not only a suitable tool to provide a temporal and ubiquitous access, but they provide unique features and advantages which may fill the gap between education and industry in the 4.0 paradigm. In this paper, we aim to outline how the 4$^{th}$ industrial revolution is concerning education, and specifically focusing on how the Industry 4.0 paradigm is transforming educational web-based laboratories perspective.

This article presents the results obtained from the collaboration and participation of the Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED) and the renewable energy company INOMA, both based in Spain, in the Microelectronics Cloud Alliances Project (MECA project). As part of this project, three open courses were created, two of microelectronics and one of maintenance in renewable energies systems. These courses were integrated into a cloud architecture, which are accessible to everyone. After three years of project, which involved the development and design of cloud architecture; the contents and implementation of the three courses; and a small pilot test. This article presents the results and conclusions reached, as well as points to take into account in the future.

This paper presents some results of European projects for improvement and innovation of engineering education. It summarizes the application of performance support systems, previously used only for company training, in higher education and discusses its advantages. The development of distributed in four European countries performance-centred learning system for information technology, telecommunication, and microelectronics is also presented. As the practice in engineering education is crucial, virtual laboratories with demonstrations, animations and simulations were developed as well as laboratories with remote access to real experiments. Finally, our recent work on the creation of microelectronics Cloud system in nine European countries is presented by an example of building cloud nodes at an installation site.

The purpose of this article is to study the dynamic reconfiguration in FPAA and, because of its potential, its academic applications. State driven and algorithmic reconfiguration methods have been considered during this work. Since these devices are not as well-known as FPGA, it is interesting to study its characteristics and abilities. The algorithmic method has been developed, obtaining conclusions about its use in education for technical and non-technical fields.

In this paper we focus on the achievements of eMadrid initiative in some fields of technology-enhanced learning, mainly involving the improvement of the mechanisms for open educational content retrieval from Internet, considering Internet resources as potential learning objects. Also we facilitate the integration of remote laboratories and external tools in virtual campuses architectures supporting enriched capabilities and describe a way to cluster and identify learner weaknesses using a learning analytics approach in combination with the item response theory.

Online learning tools, such as courseware, learning management system, assessment tools, virtual, and remote laboratories are used in blended and distance learning. These online tools, Apart from being able to provide learning activities, allow displaying learning resources such as web pages, pdf or doc files and multimedia contents. This paper describes some online learning tools and the challenges to apply them in distance learning.

This paper presents a thorough study on the available lab server software technologies for the design of remote laboratories. The paper focuses on the common outstanding technologies applied for this purpose such as LabVIEW and MATLAB. The paper addresses as well on other solutions such as high-level programming languages, e.g., C/C++ and .NET languages, pointing out the advantages, limitations, and applications of each. This is in order to ease the selection of the appropriate software when designing a remote lab. Furthermore, the paper points out applications in which various technologies are adopted in order to make use of the exclusive features of each. The study is preceded by a brief overview on the main hardware and software components in the construction of today's remote laboratory for engineering practice to emphasize the role of the controller server in the lab operation.

Until a few decades ago, face to face classrooms and hand-on laboratories were the common solution for teaching theory and practice. But, new e-Learning tools have emerged and learning methodologies such as blended and distance learning have taken an important space in learning initiatives. Among them are virtual and remote Labs which provide student with a learning environment where can carry out the experiments through Internet and acquire the needed skills to develop his future jobs. This paper describes the importance of virtual and remote labs and their usage in learning scenarios.

Higher education has undergone a deep change in Europe since Bologna Declaration. One of the main tools to affront this change is through the incorporation of new technologies and learning methods, such as mobile and blended learning. This paper shows new services aimed to provide a personalized and closer education to learners. It will be achieved thanks to the integration of new services into the existing educational environment, giving rise to the concept of service-based learning. This concept is based on the philosophy of re-usable educative objects to create encapsulated and re-usable educative services easily integrated in e-learning platforms.

This paper introduces a generalized solution to support the development and reuse of practical educational scenarios. It is intended to complement the reuse initiatives already proposed for LMS resources, such as LOM, SCORM or IMS. These initiatives are mainly focused in media contents. By the contrary, this proposal is concerned with the tools that can be used in practical educational scenarios: simulators, remote labs, communication tools, etc. It considers the way in which these tools can be described, but also the way in which these tools are intended to be used. At this point, three main issues are supported: authorizations, awareness and interaction. This proposal is part of a more comprehensible development based in the language PoEML. It extends the IMS Learning Design capabilities to support practical scenarios through a generalized solution.

Creating, cataloguing and distributing high quality learning contents requires a significant investment of resources and time. Nowadays information technology applied as a tool in education has drastically reduced these efforts. It makes it possible to share, use and exchange digital documents under certain conditions specified by the author without any cost. Furthermore, the use of standards can improve development and reutilization. Learning objects are the new paradigm developed for spreading knowledge and increasing interoperability through metadata.

The arrival of new technologies to universities creates new situations and problems that must be solved in order to improve the care, support and tutoring provided to students. In many cases, the communication flows between teachers and students place an excessive demand on the teacher’s response capacity. This paper describes a system designed to answer automatically the questions of students, using the existing knowledge stored in e-learning platforms, such as dotLRN or Moodle; indexed in search engines, as Google or Yahoo; or data repositories as wikis.

All the different kinds of education are converging to a blended learning one and a large number of new applications has appeared using educational platforms (LMS, Learning Management Systems). Besides we must have into account the importance of the security in our applications, in order to get a suitable behavior of our system. One of these possible applications would be in the evaluation procedure. This article describes this huge area for Higher Education considering different technologies where biometric technology will be our cornerstone. Our application will be developed in two different scenarios: in traditional and on-line test.

Nowadays there are a great number of universities and organizations working on developing virtual labs. These virtual labs allow students to carry out their experiments and acquire practical knowledge. At the same time these universities are using one or several learning management systems that allow professors to display and organize theoretical content. A good solution is the integration of learning management system and virtual labs. That is what we are going to describe in this paper. We are working on a middleware that allows using the LMS's services together with the virtual labs.