Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents one of the most rapidly developing fields of the current era, with its applications already supplementing various aspects of everyday life. But, with this ever-widening adoption, concerns arise regarding the processes behind its decision-making and the fairness of the produced results. This paper uses the Restricted Systematic Review format to investigate the relationship between AI, women, and engineering education. The review, conducted from IEEE Xplore Conference Papers and Journal Articles from 2010 to 2024, seeks to indicate the evolution of the subject over the designated period, the various ways AI is used in different aspects of education, the gender-related biases and discriminative outcomes that can be inadvertently replicated, but also how this technology can be deployed to advance equity. Initially, 279 papers were retrieved from IEEE Xplore, of which 111 were considered potentially relevant and were read. Finally, 34 papers were found to be relevant and were thus synthesized for this review. The results support the potential of AI in educational processes, a part of which is already being actively researched, especially regarding learning analytics and outcome prediction. In addition, the review confirms that researchers are becoming aware of the gender-based issues that can occur based on historical evidence and have begun proposing some potential actions to mitigate them. The review aims to help stakeholders further explore and leverage the capabilities of AI to foster an inclusive engineering education field for both students and teachers by identifying under-researched areas and applications.

In the context of women's integration into the working domain, the gradual reduction of the gender gap across numerous professional fields continues to be a reality. However, it is imperative to underline that the attainment of full gender equity across professional domains, including engineering, remains an unfulfilled objective. This document is aimed at presenting a general view of the gaps regarding women in engineering through a literature revision of the works included in the proceedings of IEEE EDUCON, to identify the factors that may still underlie the low representation of females in engineering and provide guidance to this conference stakeholders for upcoming studies and publications on this topic. The results indicate that factors such as entry and affordability hurdles, inadequate training and built-in prejudices, along with prevalent sociocultural norms, constrain greater diversity and inclusiveness of females in engineering majors. As such taking action now aiming to eliminate the gender gap by reversing these trends may result in the desired outcome. It may also provide new sources of global economic growth and support the implementation and achievement of sustainable development and inclusive growth. Finally, the literature review highlights the importance of going beyond the diagnostic phase while identifying lines of work to be strengthened.

This research focuses on the critical role of urban environmental education for addressing both human well-being and climate change, especially in densely populated metropolitan regions. Recognizing the particular vulnerability of these urban zones, the study introduces educational innovations to respond to these intertwined societal and ecological challenges. By integrating advanced technologies such as sensors, IoT, and generative Artificial Intelligence with inquiry-based pedagogy, the initiative promotes broader democratic engagement. This approach results in the development of accessible technological solutions that visualize and disseminate data on key urban environmental indicators, such as tree coverage and heat islands. By merging these technologies with pedagogic activities, the study presents novel learning designs that bolster both digital and environmental competencies. A cascading model ensures that educators and academic institutions are equipped with the necessary training, tools, and designs to champion eco-conscious urban information strategies, further supported by open online learning activities for effective real-world application.

This research-to-practice full paper describes a case study conducted at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería de Sistemas Informáticos at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, within the subject of Software Engineering Fundamentals. In this study, physical rewards, called MeriCOINs, were introduced as a way to gamify the subject. These rewards were progressively awarded to incentivize students throughout the course. These MeriCOINs were given as prizes within educational games and multiplechoice exam simulations presented as contests through the Wooclap tool. Students could use these MeriCOINs as part of the course process for queue advancement and late submissions. A notable improvement in student motivation and performance was achieved according to the perceptions of both students and teachers. A process for manufacturing and editing MeriCOINs using sustainable and low-cost processes was designed, which not only allow for easy and inexpensive implementation of the rewards but also establish them as a valid educational approach that can be replicated in different courses and contexts.

The importance of microcredentials has grown in recent years. The gap between study programs offered by Higher Education Institutions and the industry job demands gave rise to more open and bitesize modules in the shape of Open Educational Resources, MOOCs and microcredentials. This article shows two novel cases bridging this gap based on the recognition of the competences learning units. In addition, the article elaborates on how these competences were selected and what approaches are appropriate for the recognition of these competences. Therefore, we describe how learning outcomes are mapped to competences in tow disparate lifelong learning contexts. Finally, lessons learned and cues for further research are discussed.

Despite prior research has shown several benefits of game-based and video-based learning and has compared these methodologies versus traditional instruction, little work has been done to compare their usefulness, especially in online education settings. This paper examines and compares the usefulness of game-based learning using educational video games and video-based learning for teaching software engineering in online environments. The design of this research is quasi-experimental, involving a control and an experimental group. A total of 193 software engineering students participated in this research, 45 in the control group and 148 in the experimental group. Both groups took a lesson about software design, but the students in the control group learned through online video-based learning, whereas their counterparts in the experimental group learned through online game-based learning. A survey was used to collect students' perceptions and pre- and post-tests were used to measure acquired knowledge. The results indicate that both learning methodologies were found to be beneficial for student learning and that online game-based learning outperformed online video-based learning in terms of students' perceptions.

Contests have long been used in computer science education to address themes such as artificial intelligence, video games, cybersecurity, computer programing, or robotics. However, the organization of these contests usually require a lot of resources and are very focused on a specific topic. Furthermore, there are a wide variety of gamification techniques that can complement traditional teaching activities such as points, badges, leaderboards and rewards. Prior research suggests that computer science students especially welcome these techniques, which represents a good opportunity for computer science educators. This paper presents a novel gamified learning activity that serves students to review the concepts they have learned throughout a computer science course. The activity has a contest format and makes use of multiple gamification techniques. The designed contest is performed face-to-face and uses points, leaderboards, and awards as gamification techniques. Specifically, the contest employs the dot-voting technique to collect students' votes and uses stickers and 3D-printed trophies as awards. The trophies were designed through the Tinkercad tool and printed by using the Ultimaker S3 3D printer. Moreover, an essential element of the contest that enhances its ludic aspect is that it is based on the usage of memes, which are audiovisual elements that represent in a funny way the ideas, thoughts or feelings of some people about a certain topic. The contest can be easily replicated and can address concepts related to any computer science course. The empirical validation of the contest was performed during two academic years with 72 computer science students of a database administration course. The obtained results, gathered through a survey, indicate that the perception of the participants about the contest was very positive. The students indicated that the activity helped them to reinforce their knowledge of the course and that it was extremely fun and motivating. Indeed, some students defined the learning experience as unforgettable.

The association between agronomy and computer engineering can facilitate a collaborative scenario between teachers and groups of students from different disciplines towards investigating smart technologies to track objects, plants, or soils. Nonetheless, the combination of these disciplines is rarely integrated in curricula. This work addresses this challenge presenting a case study in the context of Higher Education studies. Therefore, a project-based learning approach is presented in which students from both disciplines contribute to create and optimize IoT systems designed to track and monitor plants, soil, and environmental variables towards promoting environmental awareness in the future engineers. This research suggests at integrating these disciplines in a jigsaw classroom using specific sustainable development goals as a mediator. The presented methodology leads to scaffold multidisciplinary learning initiatives combining agronomic and computer sciences by engineering IoT systems.

In this paper, we present an innovative open educational resource (OER) competition for students to suggest and create OERs. The competition is based on a 3E model (Enriching lectures with OERs, Extending classroom learning through OERs, and Elevating student learning with OERs), as well as a flipped learning approach (i.e., students teaching others as teachers). Student learning enhancement is evaluated using nine learning principles/catalysts. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations are presented and discussed. In particular, the student learning reflections provide valuable insights into how the OER competition can transform student learning (e.g., with reference to the Bloom’s Taxonomy/Model), including their learning attitude. The results indicate that OER competition can provide an effective method to enhance student learning, complementing traditional teaching/learning.

Over the past year, the implementation of IoT systems for monitoring CO2 in learning spaces has accelerated. The urgency caused by the pandemic has motivated the creation of multiple maker communities made up of teachers, researchers, students, parents, and volunteers in general to act together on the implementation of IoT systems monitoring CO2 in learning spaces. This article explores this topic contributing in three key aspects: First, the results of a review of scientific articles presenting IoT systems to ventilate learning spaces are described. Their CO2 sensors are characterized and classified considering their main features. Second, a European project is presented that aims at promoting environmental awareness exploring the effects of plants in learning spaces measuring CO2 with IoT systems installed in smart pots. Third, the main lessons learned are summarized and suggestions for future implementations are suggested. These results imply a relevant base knowledge towards facilitating the implementation of effective IoT systems to fulfill ventilation protocols in learning spaces.

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.

This paper presents findings on participants of a massive open online course named "Educational Robotics for all" developed under Open edX platform. The document describes the organization and structure of the MOOC and some of its preliminary results. As an example, Module 2 about Gender and STEAM is presented and discussed.

The COVID19 pandemic caught everyone unprepared. The onsite education paradigm that seemed so stable was completely shaken. Here, we present the results of a study in which 620 university students adapted to online activities with a different degree of guidance in terms of deadlines. While results show a lack of self-regulations in both iterations, results show that students spend more time on activities with tighter deadlines and more strict instructions. In addition, a not inconsiderable number of students were affected by the lack of a personal computer or an adequate workspace what raises the need to consider those students during the design of assessment activities on such adverse conditions.

A didactic experience is presented focused to a group of secondary school to learn the main features of the topic of diode-based circuits. Students have followed the experience by means of a MOOC in which didactic activities and practices have been designed using the Cognitive Motor Model taxonomy. VISIR remote laboratory is the main technical resource to carry out practices.

With the advent of the Internet, there is now a vast amount of useful learning resources available. These public resources or Open Educational Resources (OERs) can complement traditional teaching/lectures and student learning. In this paper, we make two contributions to the development of OERs for the global education community. First, we analyze the popular computing/IT-related OERs at MERLOT, one of the major OER repositories in the world. Through the analysis of peer reviews and other data, we present interesting findings and valuable insights for the development of OERs, particularly for the computer science discipline. Second, we present an innovative 3E (Enrich, Extend, Elevate) strategy/pedagogy for the use of OERs with the aim of enhancing student learning from different perspectives. In particular, students can play an important role, to find and even create OERs to enhance their learning to a new dimension.

The European Commission has been promoting entrepreneurship as a key competence. One of its main initiatives was “The Entrepreneurship Competence Framework” (EntreComp). It was published by the European Commission in 2016 to develop a common conceptual approach to support the development of entrepreneurial education. This paper presents the EntreCom4ALL model, as an example of adaptation of the EntreComp framework, and how its target groups are aligned with the Sustainability Development Goals (SDG) of UNESCO. The EntreCom4All model has been developed under an European project that aims to improve the accessibility of entrepreneurial education in young or female entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial teachers or trainers. The model has been implemented under an online platform that provides access to relevant Open Educational Resources (OER) on entrepreneurship. OER can be seen as basic elements of a trend towards more openness in education. These OER do not only need to be gathered and stored. It is also equally important to improve their visibility and use for the target groups that they are aimed at.

Creating values in learning and teaching is increasing every day. The way that the knowledge is represented in the process of education is an intellectual capital for such creation. Whereas, the typical normal methods of teaching courses remain the same even of the variety of techniques that are been used. This is how, the improvement of teaching quality is reflected in the improvement of the student behaviors, that is to have better success rates, performance and behavior compared to previous teaching methods. Therefore, the change of the student behavior, with innovative materials and resources, the dynamics of games, and the reference of what factors influence the quality of the process will result in obtaining better academic rates and results. Moreover, Gamification methodology is an innovative process designed to enhance learning techniques and knowledge delivery. This paper presents an attempt to find new Quality Model methods, with the objective of improving the process of learning where, the results showed that the class was more oriented into the creativity part of the knowledge acquirement. In the same context, the process of learning and the changes in the behavior of the learner has been improved and measured.

The academic performance of students is affected by the academic context, their aptitudes and their motivation. The latter is particularly important in Engineering disciplines because the contents to be learnt are especially complex and many students end up having a low performance that leads them to absenteeism and drop out. The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) provides several recommendations related to the academic context (ongoing assessment, mentoring processes and active learning methods among others) that seem to have a positive impact on the students' motivation. However, these cannot always be implemented due to the high number of students per class existing at many Universities. This contribution presents an empirical case study performed with 149 Computer Science students of a University organized around small groups and innovative educational methodologies. The benefits and outcomes of this academic conditions, as well as their impact in the students' motivation, are analyzed and discussed.

The academic performance of students is affected by the academic context, their aptitudes and their motivation. The latter is particularly important in Engineering disciplines because the contents to be learnt are especially complex and many students end up having a low performance that leads them to absenteeism and drop out. The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) provides several recommendations related to the academic context (ongoing assessment, mentoring processes and active learning methods among others) that seem to have a positive impact on the students’ motivation. However, these cannot always be implemented due to the high number of students per class existing at many Universities. This contribution presents an empirical case study performed with 149 Computer Science students of a University organized around small groups and innovative educational methodologies. The benefits and outcomes of this academic conditions, as well as their impact in the students’ motivation, are analyzed and discussed.

The rise of Open Educational Resources (OER) in education has allowed the issue of the quality of these resources to be increasingly relevant. The OER can be defined as resources and pedagogical materials that reside in the public domain and that allow third parties to use them freely; and under this strategy, open educational resources progressively integrates educational practices from formal, informal and lifelong learning. The purpose of this paper is to present a framework to evaluate the quality of OER in order to promote the discovering and reusability of resources by users. The framework designed is based on three tiers. The first tier is a development quality model based on the analysis of different quality proposals existing in the areas of e-learning, learning objects and open educational resources, by this model gets a quality value of a resource. The second tier consists of implementing Semantic Web technologies and knowledge representation, natural language processing techniques, and data interoperability by semi-automatic processes. And finally, The third tier gets maturity levels using quality values got the first tier both in the initial state of the OER and after its enrichment. In summary, the proposal presents a theoretical background to OER quality evaluation by an improvement to the existing quality framework that integrates developing technologies and techniques that allow the assessment of open educational resources.

In the field of higher education, students and teachers need information that allows them to facilitate and improve their education. For this reason, the web is one of the most useful information sources nowadays. Unfortunately, when a student requires information on a specific topic, traditional search engines do not search for what the student really needs. Due to this problem, many organizations have implemented repositories of open educational resources, but the main disadvantage that these have, is that they are scattered, and even unknown. So, this article presents a proposal to identify open educational resources in the repositories through an extraction process that includes the obtaining of metadata and description of each of the resources in its natural language, and later with a recommendation strategy analyze each one of the resources.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of UNESCO establishes goals and targets in areas of critical importance for humanity. Recently, members of the eMadrid network have organized the Conference Learning with MOOCs (LWMOOCS 2018), the leading worldwide global conference, inspired by this year's theme “MOOCs for All - A Social and International Approach”. This paper analyzes the main outcomes of this conference organized around the “Quality Education”, the Sustainable Development Goal 4.

In the last years, the number of Open Educational Resources (OER) on the Web has intensely increased thanks to initiatives from universities all around the world such as the Open Course Ware, and the production of Massive Open Online Courses. The potential of OERs to spread knowledge around the world is crucial. Nonetheless, spotting a list of resources targeting specific skills, and covering particular needs in a group of students is becoming a challenging task. The contribution of this work-in-progress is twofold: 1) this paper presents the results of harvesting 678 OERs and cataloguing them into specific entrepreneurship skills but also targeting three particular groups of students: young, female and trainers. This research aims at providing these students an adapted platform of OERs towards sharpening entrepreneurship skills; 2) based upon these findings, key repositories of OERs towards developing entrepreneur skills are highlighted. Data obtained through this work will allow to find precise OERs in the entrepreneurship field using a semantic taxonomy.

This Research Full Paper presents an empirical study about the motivation of Computer Science Engineering students. It is well known that student́s performance is affected by the academic conditions of the students, as well as their aptitudes and motivation. In the case of Engineering disciplines, motivation is particularly critical because the difficulty of Engineering degrees. It can lead to low levels of effectiveness and motivation, resulting in high rates of absenteeism and dropout. Therefore, it is important to reach a complete understanding of Engineering students' motivation and to draw strategies to boost it. This paper presents a case study performed with 78 Computer Science Engineering students of the Technical University of Madrid. This experience allows to analyze empirically student́s motivation and to establish learning recommendations to encourage it, as well as to compare motivational differences between students from different courses.

This paper performs a preliminary analysis of the first MOOC of the IEEE Education Society, an IEEE Free Online Course on Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OER) Repositories. The MOOC "Foundations to Open Education and OERs repositories" is based on providing a comprehensive understanding both of Open Education and OERs, as well as the way they are changing the educational environment. The selection of participants' features from the MOOCKnowledge data collection mainly focuses on socio-demographic issues, previous experiences with MOOCs, usefulness of the MOOC to the participants' professional, personal and academic spheres, and types of student interaction. The preliminary results show that additional efforts are needed in order to boost the enrolment of both females and people with low level of completed studies, as well as increasing the level of awareness regarding certification. The results also reveal a positive impact of the course on the participants' professional and personal spheres. Finally, the most relevant interaction for them is the learner-content interaction. On the basis of these results it can be concluded that this MOOC offers an opportunity for practitioners to take advantage of the Open Education philosophy and its subsequent application to their everyday educational environment.

The huge amount of knowledge sharing in the process of education is increasing day by day. The typical normal methods of teaching courses remain the same even of the variety of techniques that are been used. This paper presents an attempt to find new learning methods, with the objective of improving the process of learning by measuring the changes in the behavior of learner. The approach is to apply the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methodology to a designed online task to enhance the quality of learning process which can lead us to capture some quality attributes by studying the behavior of different learners while performing the task. This involves using techniques rooted in LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® as exploratory tools for supporting student learning and change his behavior toward solving the task.

Collaboration is key to achieve the scientific excellence. This paper presents a top conceptual view to analyze collaboration networks. This approach is based on the semantic exploitation of open sources of knowledge hierarchically organized and collaboratively created by people. Researchers could use this model in order to find peers interested in common or related subjects, or they could use it to know the subjects of interest in a certain sector. In this paper, one application scenario is presented: discovery of popular subjects underlying to scientific production of some countries of the Andean region.

The year 2012, the IEEE Education Society Spanish Chapter published a study about the introduction of the Bologna Process in engineering degrees in several Universities in Spain. The study tried to know the professors' thoughts about the core aspects of this process and its deployment in their institutions. Five years later, the IEEE Education Society Spanish Chapter is carrying out a similar study taking into account that the EHEA has been active at least for seven years. The study has two parts. The paper presents the structure of the study, and the results of the first part, comparing (when possible) with the results of the 2012 study.

Ontologies are considered one of the pillars of the Semantic Web. The semantic Web relies heavily on formal ontologies that structure subjacent data and information in machine-readable way for the purpose of that knowledge can be automatically read and processed by machines. In this work, the authors present an ontological approach of the essentials necessary for IEEE and ACM Computer Science Curricula (CS2013). The goal of this work is the improvement of the usability of curriculum through the design and implementation of Computer Science Ontology. The ontological definitions of concepts, data properties, and data objects, can be useful to impose and preserve a logical structure for new types of curricula concepts, which may appear due to autonomous Higher Education Institutions (HEI). Users benefit from getting information in open portable data formats. In this way, the developed ontology is a powerful tool that can change the way that knowledge about curriculum are specified, managed, aligned, analyzed, and shared. The semantic representation of curricula can be used in multiple modes of learning, promote academic mobility, accelerate the recognition of academic credits obtained in different educational institutions, and to integrate and interoperate different curricula of departments of computer science, or enable the convergence and interoperability of other disciplines.

This paper shows the design, approach and first collection of data of the MOOC "Foundations to Open Education and OERs repositories". This is the first MOOC of the IEEE Education Society, and it has been delivered freely and open available through IEEEx, a channel of edX.

This Research Full Paper shows and analyzes the results of a study carried out by the IEEE-Education Society Spanish Chapter about several key aspects of the implementation in engineering degrees along Spain of the Bologna process, also known as the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The study was divided into two surveys. The first survey consisted in an updated version of a previous one performed six years ago for comparison purposes. The main results were used to identify some key topics about the EHEA implementation along these years. The second survey involved new questions focused on the key topics identified in the first one. The main contribution of this paper is to offer a clear vision of the development of the EHEA in Engineering in Spain. It gathers the opinion of engineering professors related to which objectives of the EHEA have been met and which have not, and if it has really been worthwhile and our engineers come out better prepared than with the previous system. The findings of this study, as a main conclusion, show a general agreement about the lack of resources and support and the many different views about what Bologna indicates. Therefore, the need arises for a debate, not only in Spain but also in the EHEA, about the advantages and drawbacks of the Bologna process, and its possible improvements.

Presents the introductory welcome message from the conference proceedings. May include the conference officers' congratulations to all involved with the conference event and publication of the proceedings record.

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in setting up technology-focused communities of practice for teaching and learning purposes. Instructors and students can play a key role in these communities of learning by creating and/or using Open Educational Resources (OERs). In 2016 two new discipline-specific communities were created within the MERLOT OER user community: Information Systems and Information Technology (IT/IS), and Computer Science (CS). The OER taxonomies for these, predicated on the CSAB/ABET curricula were a key factor in the endorsement of these communities and their portals, by the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Education Society. This paper describes the process of creation of both communities with the aim of establishing Editorial Boards to peer review OERs in these disciplines. Moreover, some analytics of the recently-created IT Editorial Board in MERLOT are presented as well.

In an open and distributed platform as the Web there are problems associated with the heterogeneity and information overload. In this context, teaching community and learners may need some support to discover the Open Educational Resources best suited for their learning processes. In this paper, the authors propose the high-level design of a framework for the recommendation of learning content in a flexible way. In order to provide a personalized set of resources, an adaptive approach of filtering is used according to the data available of each user. To achieve this goal, the framework has been designed taking into account the best features provided by technologies of the Semantic Web in order to find online material.

Massive Open Online Courses, as latest phase of Open Educational Resources development, represents a nonformal education opportunity for a great number of people from any place in the world. This format is characterized by the great diversity of enrolled people, which are shaped by different personal and professional backgrounds, dissimilar motivations and degrees of satisfaction, among many other features. All these features make up participants' profiles, whose lack of knowledge constitutes an important barrier in order to uncover and get a better understanding of their underlying relationships within input data. The purpose of this study, whose scope is the data collection of MOOCKnowledge project, is to perform an in-depth analysis of the reasons why a person enrolls in a Massive Open Online Courses, as well as to what extent the types of motivation (extrinsic and amotivation) and their degrees are different from one profile to another. Knowledge Discovery in Databases is the methodology applied in this study that performs a comprehensive analysis of the perceptions of participants regarding their degree of motivation for participating in a Massive Open Online Course. The methodological approach carries out a data mining process by running nine clustering algorithms that cover hierarchical (agglomerative and divisive) and partitional techniques. Afterwards, the validation clustering stage raises both internal and stability measures that determine the best clustering algorithm and the appropriate number of clusters in order to decide how best the observations are clustered in the dataset. Finally, within Knowledge Discovery in Databases last stage, goes into a descriptive analysis of the resulting clustering, three motivational profiles labeled as CONVINCED, CAUTIOUS and IRRELEVANT. The analysis of the hidden relationships in the internal structure of motivational elements on each cluster might help educational stakeholders identify which ones impact in a more decisive way on participant's types of motivation regarding MOOC format.

Educational technology is very powerful. It allows not only to overcome distance and time, but also to enhance interaction in face-to-face settings. In this session of the eMadrid network, we will present how educational technology can boost education, not only in the large, but especially in the small, in the classroom. We will also show how one can influence and improve the other.

The re-use of digital content is an essential part of the knowledge-based economy. The online accessibility of open materials will make possible for teachers, students and self-learners to use them for leisure, studies or work. Recent studies have focused on the use or reuse of digital resources with specific reference to the open data field. Moreover, open data can be reused - for both commercial and non-commercial purposes - for uses such as developing learning and educational content, with full respect for copyright and related rights. This work presents a rating system for open data as OER is proposed. This rating system present a framework to search, download and re-use digital resources by teachers and students. The rating system proposed is built from the ground upwards on Open data principles and Semantic Web technologies. By following open data best practices and Linked Data principles, open data initiative ensures that data hosted can be fully connected into a Web of Linked Data. This work aims at sharing good practices for administrative/academics/researchers on gathering and disseminating good quality data, using interoperable standards and overcoming legal obstacles. In this way, open data becomes a tool for teaching and educational environments to improve engagement and student learning. Designing an open data repository that manages and shares information of different catalogues and an evaluation tool to OER will allow teachers and students to increase educational contents and to improve relationship between open data initiatives and education context.

Presents the introductory welcome message from the conference proceedings. May include the conference officers' congratulations to all involved with the conference event and publication of the proceedings record.

Scientific production reflects the advances of an academic or research activity; also, it reflects the efforts and issues in which people are engage. The researcher's contributions in each field of knowledge should be highlight in order to foster a systematic improvement of research and achieve recognition of researchers. In the current educational context, the role of creating knowledge is not exclusive to teachers, students are also encouraged to participate and even to lead academic and research projects. This fact, coupled with the need for universities achieve to become research entities, it increase the need for finding events or journals in order to disseminate the researches results. Therefore, specialized search tools are required for users to reach better results. With the aim of helping the academic staff to find the most appropriate media to publish his/her scientific production, in this paper, the authors present a technological platform that consolidates data from different sources as catalogs of call for papers and scientific databases. Later on, each diffusion media is enriched with open data available in the Web; this process leverages relationships established between semantic resources available in repositories created collectively. The semantic enrichment of the media has allowed implement an improved search service, which attempts to overcome the limitations of traditional engines based on matching keywords.

The appearance of MOOCs has boosted the creation of educational material for use in all possible contexts. However, this material is often created without much thought and without proper tools and methodologies. Much more attention should be placed on the design of educational material, since this is the basis for a successful learning experience. In this special session, we report about several interesting approaches towards the design and creation of educational material that range from the call to the definition of a discipline of Courseware Engineering, to a methodology for video recording, another one for the creation of smart adaptive content, tools metrics for teaching computational thinking, the integration of OERs, and the design and application of game-based material.

The development of transversal competences is widely recognized as one of the key elements in Engineering Education. It is essential to complement the technical training of engineers with other soft skills like self-motivation, communication or teamwork due to their great importance in the student's learning process as well as in the student's career. Thus, it is necessary to work up in resources and technologies focused in the assessment and development of transversal skills. Moreover, as the EHEA context emphasizes the autonomous learning of students, these resources and technologies should be focused in the student side. This paper presents the definition of a theoretical model of transversal skills. Also, it is introduced an ecosystem of resources and technologies that allow engineering students the self-assessment and the self-development of their transversal competences. Right now, the validation of these outcomes is starting to be conducted with engineering students from different universities.

Teaching and Learning takes place in (or in a combination of) different educational environments: classroom, online, or mobile. Blended learning, or hybrid learning, is a formal educational program that integrates face-to-face learning with technology-based, digital instruction. On the other hand, Open Educational Resources (OER) provides a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialog, knowledge sharing, and capacity building. OERs are actual resources/tools that can help enrich any classroom environment and push student thinking and comprehension. One of the fundamental concepts of OER is "the ability to freely adapt and reuse existing pieces of knowledge", and therefore be a way to create more economic and personalized learning. The OER movement has challenged the traditional value chain by employing new methods to deliver high-quality educational content. The purpose of this work is to show a way to enhance the face-to-face classrooms with integration of OERs, and thus create blended learning instruction. Reuse of OERs by both individuals and organizations may have significant creative and economic benefit for learning environments. The approach is based on Linked Data for describe and publish OER. In this new paradigm for educational content consumption and integration, OER are expected to play a decisive and productive role for blended learning. The approach presented can be used to support different blended-learning models.

One of the fundamental concepts of Open Educational Resources (OER) is “the ability to freely adapt and reuse existing pieces of knowledge.” The application of Semantic Web approach and Linked Data technologies to Open Education seeks to turn data and metadata from open educational repositories into actionable interoperability for the improvement of discovering, using and reusing of OER. Interoperability is not an end in itself. Instead, optimizing the level of interoperability has societal and educational value as a means to others purposes. Interoperability can have a positive impact on open innovation, user choice, ease to reuse and adapt educational materials, global discovery of open and diverse content, among other things. This paper reports on the implementation of Linked Open Data for open access repositories in a new interoperable and global open educational ecosystem. The goal is to improve the metadata interoperability between various collections of open material, so as to facilitate the discoverability and subsequent combining, remixing, or adapting OER; that is, OER data should be easily accessible to any user: human being or a machine agent. This work addressed two challenges in the OER ecosystem: providing evidence of globally discoverability and reusability academic resources. Although there is much further potential for teaching and learning to realize, linked open data is a critical enabler of global and interoperable OER ecosystem.

Motivation is a critical factor in the academic performance, especially in the EHEA context, where the active learning must be promoted. In the case of engineering education, it is particularly necessary to care the student motivation by several reasons. The difficulty of engineering degrees can hinder the motivation of students and it can affect the high levels of absenteeism and dropping out. Thus, it is important to work up frameworks to evaluate and enhance, in addition to technical competences, other competences such as motivation. This paper presents the definition of a motivational framework composed by several instruments, resources, mechanisms and technologies. It allows teachers and academic institutions to evaluate and enhance the motivation of their students. But the most innovative characteristic of the framework lies in the student side; it also allows students to self-evaluate and enhance their motivation by performing questionnaires, recommendations and complementary training activities. In order to validate the proposed solutions, a case study has been successfully performed with 152 students of the Technical University of Madrid. The empirical experience has enabled to confirm the usefulness of the provided framework and to explore motivational aspects related with the engineering education.

The OER movement poses challenges inherent to discovering and reuse digital educational materials from highly heterogeneous and distributed digital repositories. Search engines on today's Web of documents are based on keyword queries. Search engines don't provide a sufficiently comprehensive solution to answer a query that permits personalization of open educational materials. To find OER on the Web today, users must first be well informed of which OER repositories potentially contain the data they want and what data model describes these datasets, before using this information to create structured queries. Learning analytics requires not only to retrieve the useful information and knowledge about educational resources, learning processes and relations among learning agents, but also to transform the data gathered in actionable e interoperable information. Linked Data is considered as one of the most effective alternatives for creating global shared information spaces, it has become an interesting approach for discovering and enriching open educational resources data, as well as achieving semantic interoperability and re-use between multiple OER repositories. In this work, an approach based on Semantic Web technologies, the Linked Data guidelines, and Social Network Analysis methods are proposed as a fundamental way to describing, analyzing and visualizing knowledge sharing on OER initiatives

Open Educational Resources include a diverse range of materials making it the most representative icon arisen within the Open Content movement. Users who access and use OERs could be classified into one of these three groups: instructor, student and self-learner. To provide personalized lists of OERs according to the user profile and personal preferences, the user should be characterized by an open and scalable model. In this paper, an open linked vocabulary is proposed to describe user profiles of the open educational resources, which take into account the challenges and opportunities that an open and extensible platform as the Web can provide to learn about the OER users, and from this knowledge, offer the most appropriate resources.

The arrival of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the growth of open and online education - Open Educational Resources (OER), OpenCourseWare (OCW)- is increasingly the focus to self-learners as the primary target group. The OER movement has tended to define “openness” in terms of access for use and reuse to educational materials, and to address the geographical and financial barriers, between students, teachers and self-learners with distinguished educational institutions. MOOC initiatives emphasize free access and interactive features rather than static content. The dominant message is of the quantity of access rather than the openness of educational resources for use, re-use, adaptation or repurpose. The purpose of this paper is to present the main aspects to considerer building a framework based on semantic web technologies to support the inclusion of open materials in massive online courses and significantly to improve discovery, accessibility, visibility, and to promote reuse of open educational content in massive courses. This framework will provide a set of services that allows the discovery and access of open educational resources that are extracted from open repositories distributed. Our principal OER providers are OCW institutions. In this context, we opted to apply the principles of Linked Data to integrate, interoperate and mashup data from distributed and heterogeneous repositories of open educational materials.

The contribution of GICAC UPM group in the eMadrid initiative has focused to the application of semantic web technologies in the Open Education context. This work presents the main results obtained through different applications and models according to a roadmap followed by the group.

The access to information is essential to learning as much as instruction. The evolution of the Web, from Web 1.0, where we were consumers of information, to a Web 2.0 where now we are producers and consumers of information, has allowed the Web becomes a huge database and in constant expansion. In these days much of the information published on the Web is published on social media, represented through social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, to name only the most prominent. Each of the media and social networks has its own scheme of operation and different working characteristics, ranging from the length of text that can be used, the use of different forms to identify topics until reaching the reciprocity of relationship between the participants. For example Twitter is a social network where millions of daily messages called Tweets are exchanged, within the message can be used labels, called hashtags, to identify the subject of the message, the message also may include links to other resources that expand the original content or showing interesting information and the relationships between users are represented as non reciprocal relationships named "Following". The extraction of information posted on social networks is solved in this research through the use of linked data, that allow retrieving resources and link with other external sources, graphs databases that help represent the working scheme of a social network, and with social network analysis (SNA), technique to discover relevant information that goes beyond the individual properties. The scope of this paper is to use information that is published on Twitter to extract and recommend Open Educational Resources in order to help with the learning process. The results obtained are a set of recommendations on users (identified as experts) and virtual communities (lists of Twitter users) and related events, according to the learning needs described as tags.

Open Education is changing the educational paradigm. The consolidation of the OpenCourseWare initiative, supported by the top universities of the World, and the revolution generated in the recent years through the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses, present a new educational scenario for teachers, students and institutions. This new environment has furthered the use of e-learning, not only because of the benefits provided to students, such as flexibility of time and place, but also because anyone interested in training and learning, has access to a multitude of platforms with open resources and learning communities, not to mention the absence of admission processes or access requirements. The majority of times, this kind of courses will be the first contact between universities and students, which is of high importance regarding the prestige of the institutions. The formation of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people brings a challenge to teachers and their institutions, as they must be able to offer a course with very high quality to satisfy such a large number of students. For this reason, teachers need to develop new skills, such as managing multimedia elements or mass forums, to get an appropriate course to be published. As institutions are the final image and responsible for the courses, they must establish a process to monitor, facilitate and advise teachers to get an excellent final result. This paper shows the adaptation process that a group of teachers have developed in order to publish a course in the OpenCourseWare platform of the Technical University of Madrid. In this case, these teachers and a group of experts from the institution worked as a team to enhance the course before publishing it. As a result, the satisfaction perceived by the students who used these new materials was increased, and the published course has received a large amount of visitors as an Open Educational Resource. One of the strategic lines of the Open Education Office of the Technical University of Madrid is to promote the creation of Massive Open Online Courses from OpenCourseWare courses. This paper shows the benefits from this initiative. At this moment, the same group of teachers is developing the publication of this course as a Massive Open Online Course and many materials and multimedia resources need to be created. Besides, a new course design will be necessary to adapt the methodology to the massive conditions of the new model. To this point, teachers' opinions have been collected, and after the performance of this hard process, students' satisfaction and quality of the course will be measured to analyze the final results.

The assessment of learning outcomes is a key concept in the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) since credits are awarded when the assessment shows the competences which were aimed at have been developed at an appropriate level. This paper describes a study which was first part of the project of the Bologna Experts Team-Spain and then developed as an independent study. It was carried out with the overall goal to gain experience in the assessment of learning outcomes. More specifically it aimed at 1) designing procedures for the assessment of learning outcomes related to these compulsory generic competences; 2) testing some basic psychometric features that an assessment device with some consequences for the subjects being evaluated needs to prove; 3) testing different procedures of standard setting, and 4) using assessment results as orienting feedback to students and their tutors. The process of development of tests to carry out the assessment of learning outcomes related to these competences, as well as some basic features regarding their reliability and validity is described and first results on the comparison of results achieved at two academic levels, will also be described at a later stage.

This paper shows the results of a study carried out by the IEEE-Education Society Spanish Chapter on the state of implementation of the Bologna process in engineering degrees along Spain and the opinion of teachers about the main aspects of this implementation. These include the implementation of new learning methodologies (problem-based learning, collaborative learning, project-based learning, etc.), resources, assessment criteria, workload of students and teachers, the support of each university for the EHEA implementation, and the general satisfaction (or not) about the EHEA. The aim of this paper to contribute to a reflexive debate, not only in Spain but also in the international community, about the advantages and drawbacks of the EHEA implementation in engineering education.

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) promote mass education through collaboration scenarios between participants. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the characteristics of MOOCs that can be incorporated into environments such as OpenCourseWare. We develop a study on how the concept of OCW evolves nowadays: focused on the distribution of open educational resources, towards a concept of collaborative open massive training (as with the MOOC), that not all current learning platforms provide. This new generation of social OCW will be called OCW-S.

The assessment of learning outcomes is a key concept in the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) since credits are awarded when the assessment shows the competences which were aimed at have been developed at an appropriate level. This paper describes a study which was first part of the Bologna Experts Team-Spain project and then developed as an independent study. It was carried out with the overall goal to gain experience in the assessment of learning outcomes. More specifically it aimed at 1) designing procedures for the assessment of learning outcomes related to these compulsory generic competences; 2) testing some basic psychometric features that an assessment device with some consequences for the subjects being evaluated needs to prove; 3) testing different procedures of standard setting, and 4) using assessment results as orienting feedback to students and their tutors. The process of development of tests to carry out the assessment of learning outcomes is described as well as some basic features regarding their reliability and validity. First conclusions on the comparison of the results achieved at two academic levels are also presented.

In this paper, authors apply the Linked Data Design Issues to describe and retrieve information that is semantically related to open educational resources related to the Engineering Education, that are accessible via the OCW Higher Institutions. Linked data have the potential of create bridges between OCW data silos. To assess the impact of Linked Data in OCW, the authors present an interface of faceted search for open educational content. The authors demonstrate that OCW resource metadata related to engineering open courses can be consumed and enriched using datasets hosted by the LinkedOpenData cloud.

This paper presents an innovative approach based on the collaboration among teachers from different faculties in a technical university that participate in several degrees in the same discipline and have not previously worked together. The main results consist on educational resources that can be reused through guides in the contexts of different courses. These resources have been applied in the classroom in the academic year 2010–11.

Can mobile learning disrupt methods and practices in the educational sector? This is the question we want to answer in this special session. Several examples of mobile educational applications are presented that have been carried out within the eMadrid excellence network.

As the Web becomes increasingly populated with diverse data, it continues evolving from a Web of linked documents to a Web Linked Data. This evolution allows relationships to be expressed between content in distributed data sets, enabling the way for integration of raw data from multiple knowledge domains and heterogeneous datasets. However, as the Web becomes increasingly populated with linked data, there is also a need to support users with applications to visualize or to explore available data for a specific task, especially in mobile applications. Examples of these tasks are consuming linked data, or creating new semantic relations between data entities, people and places. With the advent of mobiles, our views and behaviors about access/interaction the Internet are shifting. Specialized applications are available as an important alternative to replace a standard web browser for mobile access. In this article, authors show a three-tier client-server architecture using Android framework. This architecture relies on the RDF data from Linked OpenCourseWare Dataset. Additionally, authors show three proof-of-concept based on architecture which integrates into a common used interface for RDF data management on mobile devices.

This paper shows the preliminary results of a study carried out by the IEEE-Education Society Spanish Chapter on the state of implementation of the Bologna process in engineering degrees along Spain and the opinion of teachers about the main aspects of this implementation. These include the implementation of new learning methodologies (problem-based learning, collaborative learning, project-based learning, etc.), resources, assessment criteria, workload of students and teachers, the support of each university for the EHEA implementation, and the general satisfaction (or not) about the EHEA. The aim of this paper to contribute to a reflexive debate, not only in Spain but also in the international community, about the advantages and drawbacks of the EHEA implementation in engineering education.

The large Continent of America has in its territory besides overseas regions, dependencies and colonies 35 sovereign countries, 25 in North America and 12 in South America. Among them there are two big countries Brazil, which official language is Portuguese and Argentina, which official language is Spanish. Both are of political and economical importance in South America. They both belong to the so called Iberian America, which is a term used since the second half of the 19th century to refer collectively to the countries in the Americas, which were formerly colonies of Spain or Portugal. The Iberian countries in Europe are Portugal, Spain, Andorra and Gibraltar. The objective of this paper is to present the history and he current status of engineering education in Iberian America countries Brazil and Argentina followed by the countries that originated the engineering education in these countries, Portugal and Spain.

This paper shows the partial results of a survey sent to all the members of the IEEE Education Society around the world about some aspects on the use of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) in Engineering Education. The main interest of this study was to learn how e-learning functionalities were being used in the field of engineering education. The study covered the most commonly used LMSs, their main functionalities (Content Delivery, e-mail, Tasks-Exercises, Forums, Mailing lists, Exams, Self-assessment, Surveys, Groupwork, Chat, Calendar, FAQs, Wikis, Blogs, Glossaries, Videoconference, Notebook, Whiteboard, Learning Paths, Student Portfolio, Podcast, Student Tracking, and Vodcast), and aspects of their use, such as knowledge levels, training, patterns of use, perception of training proficiency, usefulness, learning curve; teachers' perceptions of the students' use of the different functionalities; institutional support; exams tools, and finally, the main advantages and disadvantages of e-learning use. The objective of this paper is to show the main results of this survey in the use of LMSs, and therefore to contribute to a reflexive debate in the international community about e-learning functionalities.

The Universidad Politécnica de Madrid's School of Computer Engineering is implementing its internal quality assurance system from European directives and other sources, quality policies, and its underlying process map. One the main success critical factor implementing these processes is to obtain a real involvement of the different stakeholders. Change management is a good practice used in organizations as a way to provide a detailed road map, with caution signs pointing out the potential dangers. This paper presents the adaptation of a change management methodology to technical universities and explains the road explored implementing a key strategic process as the educational program improvement review process. We show, as an example, success results about of how a student workload study is developed and used.

Through the application of semantic technologies to describe Open Educational Resources, any agent (human or software-based) could process and understand its contents, therefore, the agent could perform tasks autonomously or in a more effective way. In this paper, we describe the design and validation of the OER-CC ontology, which models the domain knowledge of educational resources licensed under Creative Commons Licenses. One of the most important contributions of this work is that we implement different rules and axioms to identify inconsistencies between rights provided by a licensed on an learning material and particular uses that are performed on it.

Open Educational Practices and Resources are a direct response to privatization of knowledge; they promote their exchange across the world with the aim of increasing human intellectual capacity. In this document we will discuss the Open Educational Practices and Resources Movement and the notion that knowledge is a public good where technology in general, and specifically Web 2.0, provide an extraordinary opportunity for people to acquire key competences in a knowledge society while they share, use, and re-use digital contents. We will describe the key function of tools and services based on Social Software in the Web 2.0 environment in the OERs production, based on experiences gained at the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (Ecuador). Moreover, we describe the commitment of the University to the promotion of open educational practices and resources and their impact on society and knowledge economy. This is accomplished through the use of Social Software as a potential key to producing changes in the actual production model, moving from a hierarchical transfer of knowledge from the teacher to a new range of open and collaborative educational practices centered on the student.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are a direct reaction to knowledge privatization; they foment their exchange to the entire world with the aim of increase the human intellectual capacity.In this document, we describe the committment of Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL), Ecuador, in the promotion of open educational practices and resources and their impact in society and knowledge economy through the use of Social Software.

Many websites are in general poorly defined and its users are not able to find the information they need. That is the reason why many papers are addressed to propose techniques able to find the right information for a user. Most of these techniques focus on finding the required information in the whole Internet. Many times the owner of the website gives incomplete/imprecise information with low level of usefulness for the user. The re-structuring of the information is many times enough for detecting lacks of information, inconsistencies and imprecisions. However this work is normally very difficult without losing performances of the website. The authors have developed a novel application to exploit existing information in a website in a more profitable way restructuring the information without the intervention of the content provider. This paper describes the authors' experience during their participation in the European Commission ESPRIT 29158 FLEX Project.

Nowadays, we are installing in our homes an increasing number of devices, that are the main access to all kind of information systems. This new generation of digital systems have a common characteristic; they are designed to cover the information needs of the home dwellers. At the same time, they have to possess several ergonomic characteristics. They have to fit in the environment, be easy to use (and to learn how to use), be attractive to the users and, of course, provide the necessary information the users may require. A way to achieve this goal is to offer the users several ways to express their information needs to the system. In this paper we describe the design of a multimodal input subsystem for a home information system. We will discuss how different input modalities as speech, touch and writing can be combined to provide the user many possibilities to perform information-seeking tasks. This paper is based on experiences from the European Commission ESPRIT IV Project no. 29158 FLEX (Flexible Knowledge-based Information Access and Navigation using Multimodal Input / Output). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This paper presents an experience in the area of information extraction within the framework of the on-going research ESPRIT IV project FLEX. The work presented is part of a larger effort aimed at building the first prototype of a flexible information system and it has consisted in the detection and extraction of named entities from a collection of newspaper articles. Although name extraction has received the attention of the Information Extraction research community from the beginning, this attention has been recently increased by the inclusion of a Named Entity task both in the Seventh Message Understanding Conference [1] and the Information Retrieval and Extraction Exercise [2]. The work presented is a practical application of techniques discussed and developed in recent years by the Information Extraction community. Besides that practical application, the results obtained serve for validating our overall approach to cost-effective, re-usable information extraction in the context of a viable, marketable system.