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

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

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

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

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

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

Visualization of electromagnetism phenomena is difficult to achieve for learners with low spatial abilities. We are addressing this difficulty by using augmented reality interfaces to create 3D magnetic field representations as aid to student conceptualization about electromagnetic phenomena. Results of the study suggest that students with low spatial abilities perceive more enjoyment when using the AR application than those who had slightly better spatial abilities.

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

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

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

This paper reports empirical evidence on using an augmented reality based simulator in a face-to-face learning environment. The simulator was used in a Physics course to allow students (N=112) to gain insight into the way in which magnetic fields interact with charged particles by watching in 3D the corresponding trajectories. Results suggest that augmented reality technology has a positive impact on students' motivation. It would, however, be necessary to consider reinforcement activities to improve learning effectiveness.

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

The aim of this study was to investigate the attitude of learners toward an augmented reality learning activity designed to help engineering students to solve an electromagnetic problem. The sample was 122 students. Students were asked to complete a survey questionnaire based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) enhanced with perceived enjoyment items. The results of the evaluation show that intention of use the system is dependent of perceived enjoyment but not from perceived usefulness of the learning tool.

Augmented reality is a technology that can be used to deploy Problem Based Learning activities that immerse students into meaningful learning activities by overlaying digital information; such as audio, video, 3D simulations, etc., to the vision of the real world. This paper explores the integration of augmented reality based activities in web courses providers and proposes a communication flow between an augmented reality application and a web based learning course provider.

This paper presents how to take advantage of the interactive capabilities of augmented reality (AR) technology to deploy assessment activities into AR-based learning environments. It shows how to combine physical and digital spaces to design authentic, meaningful tasks where students can put into practice their skills for solving problems. The use of the framework in real scenarios illustrates its suitability for the deployment of assessment activities into AR-based learning environments.

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

In this paper, an overview is given about the research carried out in the area of mobile teaching and learning by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, a member of the eMadrid Excellence Network. Mobile learning is raising growing expectations and is considered by some authors the next disruptive revolution in education. Cognitive and pedagogical theories supporting this prospect are reviewed. How these theories can be translated into meaningful educational practices is analysed by exploring ways of usage of mobile devices for supporting learning and teaching. Finally, a portfolio of experiments and case studies carried out by the Gradient group of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid testing the application and effects of mobile learning are reported. These experiments show that the use of these devices is changing educational practices in a fundamental way.

In this paper, we describe a 3D virtual collaborative system designed for the learning of Spanish as a second language. Several initiatives for second language learning in 3D virtual worlds exploiting immersive, interactive and motivating features of these worlds have been carried out successfully during the last years. However, these systems tend to be sometimes too rigid from a pedagogical point of view, requiring the presence of a teacher. We have used the Wonderland development toolkit to deploy a 3D virtual learning environment, which is flexible enough to allow learners to improve their language skills with minimum teacher’s help, setting up an instructional sequence in which fostered, motivating, and pre-designed collaboration is the key for self-learning. The environment includes technical issues such as natural text chatting with synthetic characters, textual tagging of virtual objects, automatic reading of texts, and the integration of a 3D mouse in learning sequences in order to exploit the capabilities of 3D virtual worlds.