International audience

International audience

While headsets dedicated to mixed reality are increasingly considered to virtualize workspaces in the office, the keyboard remains mostly unchanged and nevertheless is still envisioned as an interface for common professional activities heavily demanding in text entry. However, unlike headsets, a keyboard is intrinsically limited to immobile context during its use, due to the need for physical support. In this article, we investigate a radical change in the structural shape of the keyboard, switching from the plane to a cube, allowing users to fully benefit from their whole environment by entering text in a much wider variety of contexts. We designed a cubic layout based on the QWERTY and results from two user studies to define the best holding position as well as fingers preferences and reachability to the cubic shape. Then, we conducted two subsequent user studies and one longitudinal case study to compare and evaluate typing skill transfer from the keyboard, learning curve, fingers usage, usability, and workload in various contexts. The cubic-shaped text entry device finally showed its versatility with users having similar performances while standing with a mixed-reality headset or sitting in front of a laptop, and an input speed from an expert reaching 55.1 wpm.

International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience

International audience

We presented in this paper a protocol for users’ needs gathering in order to study the strategies when they interact with data indicators. As we aim at proposing a design approach allowing the data indicators to be capitalized, we need to encourage the involvement of users in the design process. Their actions can be diverse, including appropriating, reusing, sharing, and adapting data indicators. This led us to set up focus groups including heterogeneous and non-expert users in these complex activities. The protocol, based on a gamification methodology, allows us to initiate a user-centered design approach for our proposal. The collected verbatim will then be analyzed to extract different expressions of the users’ needs for data indicators, as well as their needs in terms of interaction with the latter. The first iterations of the protocol have enabled us to establish our research directions and put our research effort in perspective.

International audience

This paper focuses on pedagogical scenario building process in cMOOCs. We aim to offer solutions to support teachers in the design, deployment and adaptation of such courses. To achieve this goal, we propose a generic cMOOC oriented pedagogical scenario building process. In adequacy with cMOOC aspects, this process allows to describe learning environments' elements, roles and pedagogical activities in this massive, open and connectivist situation. Moreover, the proposed model is generic in the sense that it allows to create scenarios regardless of a particular context or domain.

Mobile devices offer great opportunities in the field of collaborative learning. They are especially interesting in their ability to provide digital information while still supporting social interactions between group members, which are essential elements of coordinated and shared activities. However, in truly mobile conditions, e.g. outdoors, the high variability of groups spatial configurations can potentially modify coordination mechanisms. We designed and tested an orienteering mobile learning game to better understand how device use shaped collaboration in highly mobile conditions. The study involved four groups of three students all equipped with tablets. We focused our analysis on the relationship between participants' arrangements (F-formations), their device usage and coordination mechanisms (i.e. awareness, regulation, information sharing, and discussion). Our results emphasize the importance of considering the transitions between arrangements more than F-formations per se. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design and analysis of mobile collaborative activities.

International audience

With the MOOC movement, education stakeholders are taking part of a pedagogical renewal. These dynamics present different advantages such as: massiveness, openness, accessibility, etc. However, it raises particular issues related to the dropout. To remedy to this issue, a promising lead resides in supporting learners’ motivation and engagement. To reach this goal, innovative pedagogic strategies and /or sophisticated Instructional design, personalization or even adaptability are needed. The purpose of this paper is to examine the point of view of literature, the dropout issue and possible solutions to motivate learners.

Many learning environments are deserted by the learners, even if they are effective in supporting learning. Gamification is a becoming popular way to motivate user participation on web based activities, by adding game elements in their environment, but it still pays few attention to the individual differences among learners’ motivations. This paper presents a gamification system designed to be plugged on various learning environments. This system can be automatically personalised, based on an analysis of the interaction traces. In the first place, we describe the architecture supporting the genericity of the game elements. In the second place, we describe the user model supporting the adaptivity of the game elements.

International audience

Analysing learners' behaviour continuously and under ecological conditions can help designers, trainers and teachers to analyse, design, validate, and also to adapt and personalize the learning game. Metrics methods propose to collect any interactions between a user and the game. While classical metrics methods fall within quantitative approaches, we aim to extract some qualitative information on high-level behaviours. This paper is focused on learners' engaged-behaviours. Thus, to identify and to qualify learners' engagement from their traces of interaction, we combine a theoretical work on engagement and engaged-behaviours, the Self-Determination Theory, the Activity Theory and a trace framework. We implemented this approach on 12 players' interaction data collected during four months. As a result, we identified and qualified four activities that refer to different types of engaged-behaviours. Thus, this user study show the feasibility and the validity of the proposed approach.

In this paper, we propose an architecture of Project-Based Learning Management System (PBLMS). These systems offer learners indicators to support self-regulation in PBL. Indeed, when students are engaged in learning processes with LMS, they are supposed to be autonomous to find information or to organize their activities. Indeed, most of time, few tools are proposed to help them. Our research focuses on the tools which support meta-cognition process to teach learners how to regulate their learning activities during projects. In this paper, we propose a PBLMS architecture that combines together activity traces (which are recorded automatically by the system) and reporting traces (which are reported by learners themselves). This architecture allows learners to build indicators. They can specify the data to take into account and the visualization modes. We present the details of the reporting tool, used to collect reporting traces, which can enhance learners' reflective processes on their own way to learn.

Researchers have proven with both theoretical and empirical studies that technologies could enhance learning. Meanwhile, technologies could also create barriers to the latter. Particularly, when the use of technologies causes security and privacy concerns, E-learning becomes less fruitful as the participants are too afraid to be exposed by what has been provided to help them learn in the first place. This paper presents a study on user's perception in using E-learning technologies and the relevant issues. The major contribution of this paper is the awareness-raising of security and privacy issues, which are often overlooked in the research efforts that implicate user tracking and personal data usage for instructional purposes.

Digital tabletops are gaining increasing relevancy within commercial and educational sectors. These devices, with their multi-touch surfaces, can support collaborative activities while maintaining natural face-to-face communication. However, we still know little about possible learning outcomes and the situations they favor. We have conducted a study to explore how group activities on tabletops could potentially encourage collaboration on tabletops. We have particularly focused on the potential of tabletops to favor knowledge transfer, which can be translated to the question how knowledge might be assimilated, understood and transferred in the best way. This paper presents a comparative study of a learning session using concept-maps on tabletops and a learning session using traditional paper and pencil tools. The comparison revealed a tendency for the tabletop-environment to effectively support knowledge transfer.

In this article, we present a co-adaptive design approach named TE-Cap (Tutoring Experience Capitalisation) that we applied for the development of an assistance environment for tutors. Since tasks assigned to tutors in educational contexts are not well defined, we are developing an environment which responds to needs which are not precisely identified or not expressed by these users. Our approach rests on three development cycles which aim at gradually clarifying and refining users' needs and expectations which we translate into computing functionalities. Each cycle is composed of three steps that allow the use of prototypes developed with regard, on the one hand, to theories of users' activities and, on the other hand, to the needs that we have identified to be observed. We finally obtain a stable typology of users' needs and expectations upon which we base the development of the computer environment. We illustrate the two first cycles of this iterative and co-adaptive approach during the development of TE-Cap. We then discuss the difficulties raised by this type of approach.

In their daily practice, practitioners belong to local communities of practice (CoPs) within their organisation. This knowledge is rarely capitalised upon because discussions are mainly verbal. Practitioners can also belong to general CoPs online. Within these general CoPs, discussions are rarely linked to the context in which they appeared, since the members are from different companies or institutions. This paper (1) connects these two levels of CoPs by contacting practitioners belonging to CoPs centred on the same general activity but who are geographically distributed and (2) capitalises on the produced knowledge by contextualising, allowing it to be accessible and reusable by all the members. The authors detail the main results of the research: (1) a model of the interconnection of CoPs (ICP) to support knowledge sharing and dissemination; and (2) a specific knowledge management tool for the ICP knowledge base. The authors apply the model and platform to university tutors by: (1) developing a use case, which links the model and the TE-Cap 2 platform and highlights the new possibilities offered by the knowledge management tool; and (2) conducting a descriptive investigation lasting for five months.

This paper presents an approach for closely observing the different levels of Human and Computer Interactions during student’s communication activities on Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) tools. It focuses on how to efficiently track learners’ activities, along with their outputs, and to exploit the collected tracking data in order to assist participants, both learners and teachers, in the learning process. Three experiments using the system and the result analysis are also presented.

Tracking data of user's activities resulting from computer mediated communication (CMC) tools (forum, chat, etc.) is often carried out in an ad-hoc manner, which either confines the reusability of data in different purposes or makes data exploitation difficult. Our research works are biased toward methodological challenges involved in designing and developing a generic system for tracking user's activities while interacting with asynchronous communication tools like discussion forums. We present in this paper, an approach for building a Web-based system for observing and analyzing user activity on any type of discussion forums

In distance learning systems, communication tools are rarely integrated into learning activities, which does not encourage their use. The main goal of our work is to mitigate this lack of integration. Our aim is to bring the discussion activities closer to the learning activities, i.e. to situations to which the discussions must ideally relate to in order to promote learning between students. Thus, we suggest two models of forum which are contextual and based on a structuring of discussions respectively according to (1) content structure and (2) cognitive structure.