This study explores why faculty engage with curriculum analytics (CA) tools for learning outcomes (LOs) assessment and how such engagement generates actionable insights for continuous curriculum improvement. Using a two-case design across Latin American universities, we collected data through interviews, cognitive walkthroughs, and document analysis. Findings reveal that faculty engagement is not solely driven by tool adoption, but by an assessment process grounded in reflection, collaboration, and institutional support. Actionable insights emerged throughout the assessment cycle: during planning, as faculty aligned teaching with LOs; during implementation, through real-time pedagogical adjustments; and post-assessment, via visualizations generated by the CA tools. Faculty interpretation of these visualizations informed evidence-based decisions to improve course design and student learning. By documenting these dynamics across two distinct institutional contexts, the study provides empirical evidence and practical guidance for integrating CA into assessment processes, highlighting the importance of fostering a reflective culture to support sustainable engagement and continuous improvement. More broadly, the findings contribute to the LA field by moving beyond tool functionality to explain the organizational and cultural conditions required for impact, thereby addressing a persistent gap between technical innovation and demonstrated educational change.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) combines information retrieval with language generation to ground model outputs in external evidence, improving factuality, traceability, and freshness, features essential for educational assistants. However, in acronym-dense course repositories, locally defined short forms often sit far from their expansions in embedding space, yielding systematic retrieval failures even when relevant passages exist. Prior acronym work mainly targets identification and disambiguation as standalone NLP tasks, typically evaluated on scientific or biomedical corpora, and rarely quantifies downstream retrieval impact in RAG pipelines. We close this “acronym gap” with an ontology-guided augmentation strategy that preserves authoring workflows. We build a corpus-scale acronym ontology via high-recall candidate mining, LLM-assisted definition extraction with evidence spans, global corpus-level disambiguation, and light expert curation. We then apply Query-Time Augmentation (QTA) to append likely short/long forms to user queries and Ingestion-Time Enrichment (ITE) to inject complementary forms during indexing; optional embedding fine-tuning further aligns acronym semantics. On a ∼10,000-document Catalan university corpus from the Barcelona School of Informatics, we evaluate with nDCG@10, Recall@10/100, and Success@100 using paired-bootstrap significance tests over queries. QTA delivers a 45.5% average overall improvement across models, more than doubles Recall@10 for acronym-to-expansion queries, and QTA + ITE yields gains up to 64.5% over baseline.

Learning analytics (LA) emerged with the promise of improving student learning outcomes (LOs), however, its effectiveness in informing actionable insights remains a challenge. Curriculum analytics (CA), a subfield of LA, seeks to address this by using data to inform curriculum development. This study explores using CA to evaluate LOs through direct standardized measures at the subject level, examining how this process informs curriculum decision-making. Conducted at an engineering-focused higher education institution, the research involved 32 administrators and 153 faculty members, serving 9.906 students across nine programs. By utilizing the Integrative Learning Design Framework, we conducted three phases of this framework and present key results. Findings confirm the importance of stakeholder involvement throughout different design phases, highlighting the need for ongoing training and support. Among the actionable insights that emerged from LOs assessments, we identified faculty reflections regarding the need to incorporate active learning strategies, improve course planning, and acknowledge the need for education-specific training for faculty development. Although the study does not demonstrate whether these insights lead to improvements in LOs, this paper contributes to the CA field by offering a practical approach to evaluating LOs and translating these assessments into actionable improvements within an actual-world educational context.

Abstract Context Data visualizations and dashboards are essential in disseminating information to broad audiences. However, designing these instruments is complex due to the multitude of involved factors. Theoretical frameworks are therefore critical to guide the design and implementation of data visualizations. Objective This article presents the approach used to pinpoint key features that impact the creation of information visualizations, organize these features using meta‐modelling, and validate the final artefact through expert judgement. Method Meta‐modelling facilitates the distillation of characteristics and functionalities critical for the development of information systems. Utilizing this method, a dashboard meta‐model was constructed in preceding research, yielding a framework of abstract components and connections to delineate specific products. This meta‐model serves as a robust tool for the automated generation of information visualizations and dashboards. Nonetheless, to confirm its quality and efficacy, it underwent a thorough quality assessment and expert evaluation to identify and address potential shortcomings. Results The validation process resulted in positive ratings and constructive feedback to enhance the meta‐model's present iteration. Experts mainly highlighted the meta‐model's complexity and the clarity of certain entities, noting potential confusion for non‐experts. Conclusions While the meta‐model is confirmed to be a coherent and pertinent tool, it requires additional clarifications to simplify its complexity. Addressing this, graphical interfaces have been developed to enable users to interact with the dashboard meta‐model—and to create dashboard instances—through straightforward interactions.

This study examined the potential of the W-STEM mobile app to inspire and motivate more young women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Developed within the Erasmus+ project "Building the future of Latin America: engaging women into STEM," the W-STEM application collects testimonies and life trajectories of outstanding and successful women in various STEM areas, presenting them as role models of easy access. Through in-depth interviews, invaluable insights were gained into the motivations, achievements, recommendations, and experiences these outstanding STEM women shared. Analysis of these testimonials revealed inspiring messages and critical lessons that can encourage the involvement of the next generation of women in traditionally male-dominated STEM disciplines. By leveraging the ubiquity of mobile devices, the W-STEM app provides unprecedented access to female role models in STEM, demystifying stereotypes and encouraging more young women to pursue paths in these fields. With its focus on providing inspiration, guidance, and resources in an accessible and engaging way, W-STEM represents a powerful technological tool that promotes gender equity and female participation in STEM fields. As of May 17, 2024, the application has garnered 16,275 views across 344 videos, averaging 47.28 views per video. These metrics highlight the app’s significant reach and engagement, underscoring its potential impact in providing accessible female STEM role models to a broad audience and encouraging more young women to explore and succeed in STEM careers.

Quantum physics and mechanics have demonstrated significant advances and promising results in different areas using the current near-term devices. One emerging subarea in quantum machine learning is quantum natural language processing, which combines quantum computing advantages and speedups with language processing algorithms to create and perform natural language tasks such as text classification or generation. The libraries and toolboxes used in this subarea include DisCoPy and lambeq, which are used to transform sentences into string diagrams or monoidal functors, convert these diagrams into quantum circuits or ansatz and embed it into a quantum model. In this study, we used both libraries with different text-based datasets to perform sentiment analysis via classification. To do so, we create synthetic datasets to train the different models. After we obtain satisfactory results, we test the resulting models with known datasets. Despite its promising results, quantum natural language processing is far from achieving its full potential. To achieve this potential, the quantum software and hardware must be improved to make them suitable for use with more extensive and complex datasets and other tasks.

User interfaces (UIs) play a crucial role in defining user experiences and influencing the success of software products. While UI design has traditionally been subjective and iterative, data-driven approaches are becoming increasingly popular to ensure that Uis meet user needs and expectations. However, contextual factors such as the application domain can present challenges for designing Uis that are both effective and efficient. This is particularly true in the health domain, where Uis must be adapted to specific tasks and user expertise to maximize the support provided by software systems. Moreover, the urgency of delivering fully functional systems in short periods can relegate UI design to a second plane. This paper presents a framework proposal for refactoring and improving Uis using a data-driven approach, providing an efficient and systematic methodology to address not solved UI issues introduced during previous software development processes. The proposed framework has been successfully applied to two medical platforms, demonstrating the importance of data-driven approaches for UI refactoring in domains with particular necessities.

Phishing attacks remain a persistent and evolving cybersecurity threat, particularly in the context of 6G wireless networks. This paper introduces an innovative approach to combat phishing threats, leveraging advanced techniques tailored to the unique challenges of 6G environments. Our research focuses on enhancing the security posture of 6G networks by deploying adaptive defense mechanisms for real-time phishing attack detection and prevention. In this study, we employ cutting-edge deep learning models specifically customized to the 6G landscape. A multi-layer neural network architecture is utilized, fortified with advanced activation functions optimized for the dynamic nature of 6G wireless communication. The proposed model is trained on an extensive and diverse dataset, carefully curated to include phishing and legitimate activities specific to 6G networks, enabling robust learning and broad generalization.

Abstract The misinformation problem affects the development of the society. Misleading content and unreliable information overwhelm social networks and media. In this context, the use of data visualizations to support news and stories is increasing. The use of misleading visualizations both intentionally or accidentally influence in the audience perceptions, which usually are not visualization and domain experts. Several factors influence o accurately tag a visualization as confusing or misleading. In this paper, we present a machine learning approach to detect if an information visualization can be potentially confusing and misunderstood based on the analytic task it tries to support. This approach is supported by fine‐grained features identified through domain engineering and meta modelling on the information visualization and dashboards domain. We automatically generated visualizations from a tri‐variate dataset through the software product line paradigm and manually labelled them to obtain a training dataset. The results support the viability of the proposal as a tool to support journalists, audience and society in general, not only to detect confusing visualizations, but also to select the visualization that supports a previous defined task according to the data domain.

Equality and inclusion are part of the strategic plans of the universities. In particular, the Spanish government has established that the universities should have equality units to apply the principle of equality between women and men. These units are in charge of the definition of the Equality Plans. These Plans vary from one university to another, but they are focused on including the gender perspective in the university's different activities. Teachers' specific training about gender mainstreaming should be one of the key actions to foster equality in higher education. This work presents findings on participants of a course about "Introduction of the gender perspective in the University teaching" developed in the University of Salamanca in June 2020. The document describes the organization and structure of the course with a particular focus on the adaptation to online format due to the COVID-19 crisis. Furthermore, we share some of the results about the participants' perceptions and opinions on the inclusion of nonsexist language in Spanish and their educational practices.

The gender gap is a problem that occurs in different forms in regions and countries around the world. It is a goal of large international organisations, governments, companies and other entities. Although it is not a new issue, it is important to continue studying it and seek mechanisms and strategies to attract and maintain more women in these areas. In particular, in the field of education and employment, the STEM areas present large gender gaps whose reduction would not only impact the equality of men and women but would also have an impact on the economy of the countries and on improving the economic situation of women. In this context, there are initiatives in Latin America working on this issue, but it is necessary to look more deeply into the elements that influence the decision to study careers in these areas. In this context, two focus groups have been held as roundtables with STEM women from different Latin American and European countries, to answer a series of questions centred on their motivations and decisions before and during their university studies. The results obtained have provided some inputs for defining gender equality action plans in ten Higher Education Institutions from Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Mexico. Furthermore, the results show similarities with previous studies involving STEM women with different Latin American profiles.

STEAM Education is nowadays a key element for our current digital society. Integrating STEAM and developing competences such as Computational Thinking is highly demanded by the industry and higher education institutions. In order to do so new methodological approaches are required. RoboSTEAM project is an Erasmus+ project defined to address these topics by using of physical devices and robotics employing Challenge Based Learning methodology. One of the first steps in the project development is the definition of current landscape in the research field. Which means to carry out a literature mapping that considers previous applications of Challenge Based Learning in STEAM education and use of robots and physical devices to do so. This paper shows the mapping review process and the main results obtained. The mapping analyze 242 candidate works from the most relevant bibliographic sources and selected 54. Form them it was possible to see that there are not many initiatives on STEM Education related to Challenge base learning and the most of them are specially focused on the application of specific tools and in the development of concrete competences.

Games have important motivational power. They take advantage of a set of tools to encourage people to engage with them just for the joy of playing and the possibility to win. While gamification is gaining ground in a lot of areas in our society, its application in education is still an emerging trend. In recent years, gamification has attracted the attention of researchers from different areas such as teaching and learning computer programming. Ever since the first programming languages emerged, the problems inherent to programming teaching and learning have been studied and investigated. The theme is very serious, not only for the important concepts underlying computer science courses but also for reducing the lack of motivation, failure, and abandonment that result from student frustration. In most of these studies and research one factor prevails, lack of student motivation or how to motivate students to learn programming. One way to combat this problem is to use gamification. Using game design elements in non-game contexts is one of the good ways to motivate and encourage students to learn programming. To assess how gamification impacted the learning experience, we compared data from one gamified and non-gamified year. In general, the results show significant improvements in terms of attendance to class, participation, and proactivity. They also suggest that our approach can reduce the high rate of failure grade among students. In conclusion, this case study, we show how the use of concepts related to gamification can improve motivation, passion, beauty, joy, awe, e naturally the succeed in programming.

Gender inequality in STEM careers is a global problem and avoid bias in education can be a solution. This paper presents a framework for inclusion of gender perspective in engineering courses. The methodology followed in its design was divided into two phases: the developed of different educational innovation projects and a co-creation workshop. Several instruments have been created and validated, such as questionnaires, canvas model and rubrics. The framework includes elements such as the self-diagnosis and redefinition of curriculum, contents and practices, specific learning outcomes and gender and sex balanced methods and learning environments for equity.

According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2020, most of the countries have achieved gender parity in educational attainment. Furthermore, Latin America and Europe have more women than men enrolled in tertiary education. The problem arises when those numbers are analysed by degree studies. There is a gender gap in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), with a low number of women enrolled in those programs and even lower numbers of graduates. The universities have a key role to steer new conceptions and understanding of the females in STEM. The higher education institutions have to define measures and policies to reduce the gender gap in the careers of the future. This work aims to provide a proposal to analyse the gender equality gap in STEM as a first step to define gender equality action plans focused on processes of attraction, access and retention and guidance in STEM programs. The proposal was applied in ten Latin American universities from Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Mexico, and five European universities from Finland, Ireland, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom.

Software engineering provides the competences and skills to design and develop robust, secure and efficient applications that solve real problems. Students have to develop their abstract thinking to find solutions taking into account not only technical development, but economic and social impact. In previous years, different changes have been introduced in the teaching methods with significant outcomes. However, students are still facing difficulties with one of the core contents of the subject, UML. For this reason, the present work aims to introduce C4 model as a complement of the existing UML diagrams. This proposal uses the two first levels of the C4 model to complement the requirements elicitation process, traditionally based only on use cases, to let students start the design of their systems without going into greater technical details.

Abstract The aim of this article is to study how students currently understand the conception of space through different media and how that understanding helps them to intervene in the space. Firstly, the process of teaching and learning as well as innovative supporting technologies are analysed, revealing the characteristics of the contemporary student profile and better ways of teaching according to it. Secondly, we describe the evaluation of an experiment with a virtual reality (VR) system for urban project design with students of architecture from two universities. The premise is that the technology used in VR is familiar to the current profile of students. This paper aims to study the advantages and disadvantages of this trend and to find a balance. To do so, we use a quantitative method to evaluate students' profiles and their level of satisfaction with the system. The results were obtained by a questionnaire and a survey, which show the role and use of technologies in the students' environment and the degree of satisfaction when using it in the educational processes. In line with our assumptions, the value of satisfaction in the use of an advanced visualization technology in the classroom reveals a high level of motivation, in general, with differentiation between students in their first and last phases of studies.

In the fields of Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, both in career and professional contexts, the society is underrepresented. Technology is part of daily life for most of the population, the introduction of concepts such as diversity and inclusion when developing technology is a crucial objective to achieve a society built on these values. Software and technology must be developed taking into account people, converting diversity and equity concepts related to technological development. The main objective of this work is to describe a case study implemented in the Software Engineering I subject of the Degree in Computer Engineering of the University of Salamanca (Spain) to lay the foundations to establish actions to foster diversity and inclusion into engineering curricula.

Software Engineering I is a mandatory subject for undergraduate students that is taught in the second semester of the 2nd year of the Degree in Computer Sciences at the University of Salamanca (Spain). This degree exists since 1989 but it has transformed over time according to the education law changes in Spain and Europe. Software Engineering I is the first subject related to the area of software engineering that is taught in the degree. The novelty of the concepts and the need to develop abstract thinking to acquire the different competences of the subject, implies a handicap to teach the subject. The final grades obtained by the students in the subject are fairly low compared with other subjects in the degree. Moreover, the attendance to the face-to-face classes is continuously reduced throughout the semester, which affects to the continuous assessment. Some initiatives have been applied during previous school years but a global change of the subject is necessary. In order to increase the success rate of the subject and to achieve that students are involved in the learning process, authors have implemented an active learning methodology based on team working. Furthermore, two instruments have defined to measure the impact of the changes and evaluate the pilot.

Gender inequality is a global problem present in all facets of life to a greater or lesser degree. In the fields of Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, both in career and work contexts, the gender gap continues. The percentage of women who study or work in the technology sector is around 25% according to different international reports. The incorporation of gender studies in the curricula is considered one of the main actions to close the gender gap in tertiary education. Education programs should approach conceptual mismatches between gender or sex and change its foundations to guarantee equal education for any person by limiting the influence of social stereotypes and dominant culture. There are few studies that aim at describing what is the main stream viewpoints among students from research instruments previously validated. This work describes the process to elaborate a questionnaire on gender perspectives and its validation in order to describe what students of Computer Engineering careers think and what changes can be implemented accordingly in future education programs to close the gender gap.

VALS (Virtual Alliances for Learning Society) European Project intends to build knowledge partnerships between European Higher Education Institutions and Business stakeholders across the World to collaborate on resolving authentic business problems through Open Innovation and Open Source Software. To conduct these knowledge partnerships, the VALS project leverages the virtual placements, in which students from all European countries can be involved in the resolution of real business problems, developing by this way professional skills, and other business-related attitudes that will help them to enhance their (future) professional career. These virtual placements result in the Semester of Code, which is a set of practices, methods and processes for creating and managing real virtual placements. Following these ideas, this paper is focused in the description of how is designed this Semester of Code, how the VALS partners have developed different tools, guidelines and processes to manage and track the virtual placements and how are performed this set of tools and guidelines in order to achieve the success in the pilot tests of the Semester of Code and its virtual placements.

This paper describes the results of a pedagogical experiment using an Intelligent Tutoring System that also implements an Animated Pedagogical Agent. The study was performed in Portugal, as an attempt to replicate some experiments performed in the USA, and in order to verify the usefulness of the Pedagogical Agent in a different country with distinct culture. After running the experiment and analyzing the data, we have concluded that in our specific case, we did not find any evidence that the pedagogical agent could boost instructional outcomes of students in Portugal. Our data is showing no statistically significant differences between the control, and experimental groups. Additionally, we have also found that the control group actually performed slightly better than the experimental group. As a result, our study is giving some good evidences that a Pedagogical Agent that was developed, tested and successfully used in one country, may not be successful when used in a different country.

The technology applied to educational contexts, and specially the learning platforms, provides students and teachers with a set of tools and spaces to carry out the learning processes. Information related to the participation and interaction of these stakeholders with their peers and with the platform is recorded. It would be useful to exploit this information in order to make decisions. However this is a complex activity mainly because of the huge quantity of information stored. This work presents a visual learning analytics system that makes possible the exploitation of that information. The system includes several tools that help to analyze users' interaction attending to different dimensions, such as: when interaction is carried out, which are more important contents for users, how they interact with others, etc. This system has been tested with the subject information recorded during five academic years. From this analysis it is possible to show that visual learning analytics may help to improve educational practices.

VALS (Virtual Alliances for Learning Society) European Project has the aim of establishing sustainable processes to build knowledge partnerships between Higher Education and companies to collaborate on resolving authentic business problems through open innovation mediated by the use of Open Source Software. To achieve this, VALS builds knowledge partnerships between Higher Education and companies who work together on resolving authentic business problems through open innovation. The innovative approach is to leverage virtual placements of informatics students in companies in order to foster entrepreneurial skills and attitudes, and to make use of the results to establish new learning and teaching methods. This results in the Semester of Code initiative, a set of methods and processes for creating and managing a real virtual placement, and for integrating this into innovative teaching and learning strategy. To show these methods and processes, this paper describes the general methodology designed to perform the Semester of Code, as well as several guidelines on how to develop the software that will support this process. Also describes a real adaptation of theoretical approach of this whole process in the case of an Academic Institution, including comprehensively all the issues affecting the process implementation in a real context.

This proposes how to face up, from a technological point of view, the collection and storage of heterogeneous data coming from heterogeneous environments related to the Learning process in order to take advantage in tasks related to Learning Analytics. It introduces the problem with the heterogeneous data over the time and deals how to resolve this issue giving up a theoretical approach and a proof of concept.

Knowledge representation (KR) can be defined as a set of ontological commitments, provided with the capabilities of performing inference. The knowledge can be represented using an ontology, which provides a shared insight into a certain domain. The use of ontologies to represent knowledge also allows interoperation among knowledge-based systems. The process of building ontologies can be tedious and sometimes exhaustive. A possible solution in order to avoid this problem would be to reuse the ontologies previously created by others. This paper describes a case study of reusability using OWL-VisMod, a tool designed for developing ontological engineering based on visual conceptual modelling for OWL ontologies. A workflow performed with OWL-VisMod is described; including a decision-making process in order to decide whether or not it could be desirable to reuse an ontology, according to the requirements of a certain project.

A R&I&i process for a knowledge management system development is presented. It transforms different institutions experiences into organisational knowledge applicable to an entire sector, the higher education one specifically. The knowledge management system allows classifying, organising, distributing and facilitating the application of the knowledge generated by the faculty. A study, with more than 1000 system users, reflects that the system helps to the faculty in the way they perform educational innovation activities. The supported model integrates both Nonaka's epistemological and ontological spirals. This allows defining ontologies and used them in order to transform the individual knowledge into organisational one. The knowledge management system encapsulates complex logic expressions and ontologies management, making easy for the users obtaining successful results that may organise in their own way, becoming a powerful knowledge management process that combines epistemological and ontological knowledge spirals to convert individual experiences in educational innovation into organisational knowledge in the higher education sector.

Recent research has confirmed the impact of electronic media usage on student outcomes. However, little is known about the impact of measurable reading access to a forum and other resources. We have developed a tool to study this aspect through visual analysis. Results from this study showed that not only participation on electronic discussion for a, such as reading or posting, but also the reading access to the resource, can alert about the student's performance. This came about after proving the existence of a strong influence relationship between the frequency of reading access to discussion for a and the frequency of access to posting for a, as well as between the frequency of reading access to resources and the frequency of access to posting for a in the outcome of the students. However, we have found that the union of the variables above, i.e., frequency of posts in for a, reading of discussion for a and reading of resources can be visually analyzed, thus obtaining a better visualization of the patterns of students' performance.

The Internet and its increasing usage has changed informal learning in depth. This change has affected young and older adults in both the workplace and in higher education. But, in spite of this, formal and non-formal course-based approaches have not taken full advantage of these new informal learning scenarios and technologies. The Web 2.0 is a new way for people to communicate across the Internet. Communication is a means of transformation and knowledge exchange. These are the facts that cannot be obviated by the organisations in their training programmes and knowledge management. This special issue is devoted to investigating how informal learning changes or influences online information in Social Web and training strategies in institutions. In order to do so, five papers will present different approaches of informal learning in the workplace regarding Web 2.0 capabilities.

The literature in educational research has established that monitoring student learning is a crucial component of high quality education. When instructors and students are not in a face-to-face traditional environment, new forms of student monitoring must be explored. The effective use of CMS requires that instructors been provided with appropriate means of diagnosing problems so that they can take immediate actions to prevent or overcome those situations. The aim of this research is to support the comprehension of the evolution of the semantic content within eLearning environments through uncovering by means of visual representations. Therefore, we have carried out the mining of an eLearning database and represented the more relevant results by depicting them using a visualization based in the tag cloud visual representation. In this paper, we introduce a visual representation, which integrate a wave-graph and a bar-graph into a tag cloud representation to understand the evolution of words.

Software maintenance is a complex process that requires the understanding and comprehension of software project details. It involves the understanding of the evolution of the software project, hundreds of software components and the relationships among software items in the form of inheritance, interface implementation, coupling and cohesion. Consequently, the aim of evolutionary visual software analytics is to support software project managers and developers during software maintenance. It takes into account the mining of evolutionary data, the subsequent analysis of the results produced by the mining process for producing evolution facts, the use of visualizations supported by interaction techniques and the active participation of users. Hence, this paper proposes an evolutionary visual software analytics tool for the exploration and comparison of project structural, interface implementation and class hierarchy data, and the correlation of structural data with metrics, as well as socio-technical relationships. Its main contribution is a tool that automatically retrieves evolutionary software facts and represent them using a scalable visualization design.

Despite the development of contents specifically for LMS, and in spite of the various features they provide, the knowledge of the actual use made by individual participants is emerging as a unavoidable necessity, so as to ensure proper operation and effective use of LMS. Moreover, the use of highly interactive visual tools can provide the benefit of understanding the educational process recorded in the database associated with the current platforms. However, there exists the problem of the integration, or not, with the LMS and therefore the transparent retrieval information and usage of these tools for the students as well as tutors.

Service oriented approaches (SOA) are currently used to develop new software-as-a-service applications, but they can also be used in the reengineering of existing legacy systems, such as Learning Management Systems (LMS). The introduction of a SOA to reengineer current LMS can provide LMS with the ability to deliver internal functions as services as well as the ability to integrate external applications as services. This paper presents an architectural approach to adapt the Moodle LMS to the SOA and some important issues involved in the adaptation are analyzed. Taking into account interoperability specifications, all SOA to LMS adaptation drawbacks are solved by the application of the new architecture.

The use of highly interactive visual tools can provide the benefit of understanding the educational process recorded in the database associated with the current e-learning systems. This is the path followed by ViMoodle, a visual analytical tool whose main function is to support the Moodle e-learning platform.

AHKME's aim is to provide a system with adaptive characteristics and knowledge management abilities for students and teachers. The development of this system is based on metadata, since the knowledge representation is made through it, and knowledge management of all the information in the platform is done using the descriptive metadata. In this system metadata is used to satisfy the requirements of reusability, interoperability and multipurpose. The system provides authoring tools for teachers to define learning methods with adaptive characteristics, as well as tools to create units of learning allowing users with different roles, promoting both collaborative and group learning of several types. To support knowledge management, the system is endowed with tools to retrieve, import and evaluate learning objects, enabling the possibility of students to use quality educational contents that fit their characteristics. And teachers have the possibility of using and retrieving quality educational contents to structure their courses.