This research WIP paper describes the case of a first-year engineering course which, contrary to modern trends in education, reduced the presence of blended learning in its methodology, transitioning from the flipped classroom and intensive continuous assessment models back to traditional instruction. Typically, blended learning methodologies like the flipped classroom are regarded to have the positive effects of improving engagement and fostering a student-centered learning approach. However, there are also concerns regarding the potentially increased workload that this system imposes on students. This study analyzes course resource usage trends by students, comparing the final year under the blended learning method with the first year after the switch to traditional instruction. More specifically, the volume of student activity, its timing throughout the semester, and the preferred types of resources are compared between both methodologies. The study found that, in terms of time spent interacting with resources, there was not a significant decrease between both iterations of the course, although the types of resources favored by students do vary between methodologies. Additionally, the activity distribution throughout the semester is observed to be heavily influenced by the timing of exams in both scenarios.

This research WIP paper describes the DACEM project, aimed at enhancing course catalogues to support the objectives of the Erasmus+ program. Within Erasmus+, course catalogues serve as essential tools for students in their quest for suitable academic opportunities and for institutions in negotiating bilateral agreements on shared programs. Despite numerous initiatives and years of experience, European higher education institutions still face significant challenges in providing appropriate course catalogues, which directly impacts student mobility. This paper conducts an analysis of the current course catalogues situation in 7 European countries (Estonia, France, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain), examining general trends, the availability of solutions, and key difficulties. Additionally, it evaluates the needs and use cases of end users and stakeholders, highlighting the essential technical features that course catalogue software solutions should encompass. By compiling key requirements, this paper contributes towards the development of appropriate and sustainable course catalogues for Higher Education Institutions.

Among the different types of applications within the realm of learning analytics, predictors and early warning systems are particularly interesting thanks to their ability to identify potentially struggling students at an early stage of a course. This paper presents a performance comparison of different classification algorithms that aim to predict whether students will pass or fail a course, using only LMS activity data from its first few weeks. Two different time frames are considered: first, using exclusively data generated before any assessment activities are performed in the course; and second, allowing the use of data originating within the time period up to, but not including, the second partial exam of the course. The study targets a first-year engineering course at the University of Vigo. In the first scenario, the tested classifiers struggled to correctly identify passing students, an issue that is mitigated in the second scenario. The main hindrance to the classifiers' performance, particularly in the first analyzed scenario, is working with a set of unbalanced data in which the number of students who pass the course is extremely low compared to those who fail.

This Research Work-in-Progress focuses on how students make use of supporting videos provided in a flipped classroom context. More specifically, this study analyzes the academic implications of the timing of video accesses: late (during the few days preceding an exam) or early. The experiment was performed in a first-year engineering course. The course is divided into 6 splits, ranging from 2 to 4 weeks each. Every split introduces new videos and ends with an exam. Data from 90 first-year students were collected. Two main analysis tasks were undertaken: assessing the correlation between the number of videos accessed early or late and exam scores, and student clustering depending on the general timing of video accesses. Significant correlation between early accesses and exam scores was only observed on the first split. Also in this first split, 3 student groups were identified via clustering: low activity, mostly late and mostly early. Interestingly, there were significant differences in long-term performance between these groups. This is a valuable result towards the development of an early warning system, as it helps identify students at risk at a early stage.

In learning analytics applications, some of the most important data sources often include the activity of students in online platforms such as learning management systems. While the utility of logs extracted from these kinds of systems is undeniable, it is important to be aware that there may be contextual factors that can change how these data is interpreted. The study showcased in this paper analyzes the direct influence between the activity volume of students in a course, as given by Moodle LMS logs, and academic performance, in the form of the final grade obtained. Moreover, we perform separate observations of this influence depending on whether the student is enrolled in the course for the first time, or if they are retaking it after failing to pass in previous academic years. The results show that a correlation exists between raw volume of interactions with the LMS and final grade, but only for first-time students. This correlation is nonexistent when considering retaking students.

This Research-to-Practice Work in Progress addresses the need for predictors in educational environments to make reliable predictions of student performance as early as possible. This is the main foundation of early warning systems, tools that aim to detect students at risk of failing or dropping out of a course, and do so at a point in time at which it is still possible to execute effective interventions to help these students. This study, carried out in the context of a first-year university course, presents a classifier of students depending on whether they are expecting to pass or fail the course, using exclusively data available before any assessment activities are performed. This classifier is based on the Random Forest algorithm. The obtained results, while limited by the scarcity of data, show promise that it is indeed possible to detect students at risk of failing with acceptable reliability in the studied educational context.

Colonoscopy, or lower gastrointestinal endoscopy, is a medical procedure whereby displacing a flexible endoscope along the large intestine, a health care professional can perform examinations and even perform some interventions. This paper presents a Work-in-Progress towards a virtual training environment for colonoscopy, LoGIViT, based on the use of immersive technologies. Employing Unity engine and virtual reality headsets, LoGIViT aims to provide an affordable simulator reproducing the physics involved in the procedures. LoGIViT is prepared to enable the programmatic generation of large intestine scenarios with varied features and conditions dynamically generated that can be configured by the user and generated dynamically.

This paper details the most recent developments that were performed in the online platform BeA (Blended e-Assessment) in order to increase its usefulness and utility within the new prominent learning contexts that appeared in the year 2020 as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to safety recommendations such as social distancing, in-person exams need to be performed under strict restrictions, and remote exams have increased in popularity as a way to evaluate students without them leaving their home. The new BeA features allow students to directly upload pictures of their answers to the platform, circumventing the need for the exams to be scanned by the teacher. This both minimizes physical contact during in-person exams and allows students to submit their answers from home in remote exams. These new features were tested during remote exams in the 2019/2020 academic year, garnering an overall positive reception by students.

Abstract Lifelong learning requires appropriate solutions, especially for corporate training. Workers usually have difficulty combining training and their normal work. In this context, micro-learning emerges as a suitable solution, since it is based on breaking down new concepts into small fragments or pills of content, which can be consumed in short periods of time. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we offer an updated overview of the research on this training paradigm, as well as the different technologies leading to potential commercial solutions. Second, we introduce a proposal to add micro-learning content to more formal distance learning environments (traditional Learning Management Systems or LMS), with the aim of taking advantage of both learning philosophies. Our approach is based on a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that is deployed in the cloud. In order to ensure the full integration of the micro-learning approach in traditional LMSs, we have used two well-known standards in the distance learning field: LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) and LIS (Learning Information Service). The combination of these two technologies allows the exchange of data with the LMS to monitor the student’s activity and results. Finally, we have collected the opinion of lectures from different countries in order to know their thoughts about the potential of this new approach in higher education, obtaining positive feedback.

The continuous effort to provide novel solutions to the educational field makes necessary to engage those technologies to improve the experiences gained from education. This review presents the current state of Personal Teaching Environments (PTEs) that help teachers in fulfilling their educational tasks. We performed a study to investigate how PTEs have been applied in educational settings. This review focus on presenting the concepts of PTEs and applications, systems, and techniques that help teachers in their educational tasks from planning to assessing (including feedback). The information extracted from the study gave us a useful overview of PTEs, such as new methods, possible advantages, and drawbacks when using PTEs. This review considered literature from the period of 2009 till 2019 as a ten years timeline. Finally, an attempt has been made to identify future research paths.

This paper presents the objectives and developments in the scope of the HERA project, an Erasmus + initiative whose purpose is to address the interdisciplinary soft skill needs in the fields of engineering and economics. HERA deploys active learning to expose Higher Education students to complex challenges, the solution to which requires the integration of interdisciplinary knowledge in engineering and economics in a manner that emulates real-world problem-solving processes. The article describes the HERA serious game environment and proposes the game dynamics, scenarios and challenges, showing how they can be used to achieve the project goals.

This paper introduces the Spanish Chapter of the IEEE Education Society, the CESEI, and its main activities. Along the years since its appearance, the CESEI has developed several initiatives devoted to promote the development of engineering education using new information and communication technologies. Publications and participation in relevant conferences have attracted the main efforts, but also the awards provided to the best student academic works is a remarkable action. It deserves special attention the activities performed in cooperation with the student branches, because they have been very fruitful. The paper describes all these initiatives and discusses about future actions.

This paper presents a new module for the BeA (Blended e-Assessment) platform, aimed to be used in a higher education subject that combines the flipped classroom system and gamification features. Currently, this subject implements the flipped classroom methodology as well as intensive continuous assessment. Under this system, students are asked to watch videos that explain course contents, doing so as homework on a weekly basis. Then, students undertake an exam in the classroom covering the corresponding week's contents, counting towards the final grade of the subject. In a new approach, we decided to have students take exams every two weeks instead. However, this creates the need of maintaining a high level of student engagement, in order for them to keep watching the videos every single week. That is why we are developing a tool that allows us to apply gamification on days when students are not assessed. This tool consists of an online question system (as a multi-choice test) accessible through a web browser, which students can answer while being involved in a game.

The participation of students in the form of questions to be answered in the classroom is a key activity of the flipped classroom methodology. Those questions arise when the students watch educational videos out of the classroom (another key part of the aforementioned methodology). However, low student participation is a common problem within a flipped classroom setting. As a solution to this problem, and in order to encourage the active participation of students making questions, we are developing a system with which students can anonymously ask questions about the content of the videos, which will be later answered in class by the teacher.

This Research to Practice Work in Progress presents the first steps and ideas of a framework to address the problem of suggesting the most suitable recommendations for instructors (for teaching and assessing), by designing an intelligent multi-agent recommender system that uses data analysis methods. The paper addresses the whole framework, specifically focusing on the assessment part. The framework proposed takes into consideration the heterogeneous personalities and teaching/assessing styles of different instructors to personalize and customize their experience. It provides immediate and customize instructions and feedback to help instructors improve their educational tasks. The dataset contains data collected from the engagement of the instructor with the agents, to predict their teaching/assessing style from their behavior. The agent system has the ability to recommend methods and tools against a topic. It tries to build different instructors' profiles, to generalize the most common practices toward an activity for future use. The agent system is like a personal assistant that helps teachers with finding information, and it gives them recommendations.

This Research to Practice Work in Progress presents an analytics add-on for QMSFC (Question Management System for Flipped Classroom), an online tool with the purpose of increasing student engagement and participation in a flipped classroom setting. This is done by providing an interface that students can use to post questions about educational videos, which would then be answered by the teacher in the classroom. The data generated by QMSFC could be collected and used to expand upon the functionalities of the platform, such as alerting the teacher about particularly tough topics for students. Additionally, these data could be analyzed together with student grades in order to find out the correlation between the volume of activity on the platform and exam performance. Work remaining on this project involves using the fully developed tool in a real learning situation and analyzing the results and feedback obtained.

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 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.

SNOLA is a Thematic Network of Excellence recognized by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness composed of the main Spanish researchers in the field of learning analytics. This network emerged in 2013 focusing mainly on the technology underlying learning analytics development, but also interested on the integration of other views and disciplines that give the network a wider scope. During these years, SNOLA has carry out numerous actions with the goal of promoting the collaboration on this field, the diffusion of knowledge and initiatives, the collection of resources and the provision of broad support. Remarkable examples of these efforts have been LASI Spain events, workshops at TEEM conferences or the numerous webinars. In this case, the EDUCON 2018 has given us the opportunity to organize this special session where 5 papers have been selected for presentation.

Self-regulated learning involves students taking the responsibility of their own learning. Self-regulated learning students usually adopt a variety of learning strategies and behaviors, such as the performance of forethought-performance-reflection cycles or the regular and sequenced work over time, that eventually enable them to achieve a more significant and long-lasting learning. In this paper, we explore if these particular behaviors and strategies can be analyzed through the application of process mining techniques taking as data the events registered during the performance of learning activities. The discovery of the underlying processes followed by students can open new approaches to study the real self-regulated strategies used by students. The paper reviews the techniques and tools available to perform the process mining of events related to self-regulated learning and describes some initial works in this area. Furthermore, as an initial empirical study, we analyze the process followed by students regarding the visualization of videos provided in a first-year engineering subject. The obtained results are studied taking into account the grades obtained by the students. The results show that the students that obtained the best grades follow more varied routes than the students that obtained the worst grades. In addition, the best ones are more regular over time regarding weekly video visualization, mainly at the beginning of the term, while the worst ones visualize the videos mainly at the second part of the term.

Lean and Agile methodologies are currently two of the most popular trends in production and software engineering. They have been widely adopted in industry to reduce production costs, improve product quality and team efficiency, provide continuous value to the client, etc. Nowadays, it is desirable if not required that any graduate have a good knowledge of these methodologies in order to be truly prepared for the real work market. Nevertheless, it is not clear if these practices have already been adopted in engineering higher education. In this regard, the LEAP project is aimed at supporting the teaching and learning of these methodologies by developing a suitable educational program and good supporting materials, particularly game-based resources. As a first step towards this goal, a study of the current situation related to the adoption of lean and agile methodologies in higher education in four European countries have been carried out: Greece, Portugal, Spain and Estonia. The study focused on two main parts: (i) national policies, practices and strategies to link learning processes to industrial practices; and (ii) current practices for exposing students to Lean and Agile industry practices using ICT. This paper shows the main findings of the study and introduce the basement towards the development of the LEAP project.

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.

This Research to Practice Work in Progress presents a chatterbot used as a frequently asked questions assistant for students that follow a Computers Architecture course in the degree of Telecommunication Engineering Technology at the University of Vigo (Spain). The chatterbot is a conversational agent that interacts in natural language with the students. This agent will be in charge of doing the tasks, usually carried out by the teachers, such as answering the students' questions and solving the common doubts that arise over and over again in every academic year. The bot is being developed in AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language).

This paper presents a system that works as an assistant for students in their learning process. The assistant system has two main parts: an Android application and a server platform. The Android application is a chatterbot (i.e., an agent intended to conduct a conversation in natural language with a human being) based on AIML, one of the more successful languages for developing conversational agents. The chatterbot acts as an intermediation agent between a student and the server platform. The server platform contains four repositories and a recommender (which are part of a bigger professor assessment system). The final objective of the assistant system is to make a student able to carry out several actions related to his/her learning and assessment processes, such as: to consult exam questions from a repository, to receive recommendations about learning material, to ask questions about a course, and to check his/her own assessed exams. These actions are carried out through and Android application using a natural language interface (by voice or typing). The purpose of this development is to facilitate the access to this information through a friendly interface.

BeA (Blended e-Assessment) is an e-assessment solution that supports both teachers evaluating and students accessing and reviewing their assessments on line, anytime and anywhere. Students perform their tests, exams or exercises in paper, but the assessment made by teachers and reporting of results to students is performed on-line using scanned copies of the papers. BeA includes functionalities allowing teachers to classify and manage common errors, guaranteeing coherence and consistence along the assessment process. This paper introduces a work in progress using BeA to support Self-Regulated Learning and Formative Assessment. This involves promoting a reflective dialogue among teacher(s) and students around the assessment results. BeA statistical tools enable teachers to identify the more frequent mistakes and to group students based on such mistakes. Teachers can send general or specific feedback to learners and use predefined prompts in order to initiate student self-reflection and self-awareness of their mistakes and misconceptions.

Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) has become one of the most suitable approaches to learning and teaching for the development of competent and autonomous lifelong learners. A main issue is to support learners setting up their own learning goals, managing their own resources, including spaces and time, and monitoring and reflecting about their performance. Time management plays a main role in this approach. During the last years many web tools and mobile apps have been developed to support students managing their agendas, recording the time they devote to different activities and visualizing it in attractive graphics. In general these systems provide a view of the activities performed by the student in a particular system and the time devoted to each activity. In this paper we propose a contribution on this subject focused on two issues: self-regulation and interoperability. We are working towards the recording of online and offline student activities not just taking into account the functionalities or resources used, but also the goals, strategies, tasks or rewards considered from a SRL point of view. From the interoperability point of view, our goal is to support the tracking from different systems using a specific SRL xAPI profile.

Game-based learning and Problem-based learning are two different approaches that share some common principles about learning: student motivation and engagement, competence-based development, learning-by-doing, etc. eCity project aims at combining these two approaches to support students on solving engineering problems using an urban simulator environment. In this way, students will be able to tackle with issues such as: mobile network deployment, electricity supply, pollution control, flooding prevention, etc. This paper introduces similar systems and projects considering both the state of the art in urban game platforms and best practices in the use of games to support education. The paper also introduces the engineering games that are being developed in eCity and proposes a problem-based methodology to guide the integration of the proposed problems in the classroom.

In this paper we present an analysis of xAPI from the self-regulated learning needs point of view, focusing on how we can record all the actions derived from the implementation of self-regulated learning strategies. There are several questions unanswered: Which information could generate each strategy? How do we record this information using xAPI? Is the vocabulary and statements of xAPI appropriate or should be extended? Here we try to answer these questions, which may lead us towards the development of a xAPI application profile for SRL.

The Open Educational Resource concept was proposed several years ago as a way to develop the Open Movement principles in the educational domain. Despite the open and participative view underlying this proposal, there has not been a significant adoption of this concept by users. Many problems and barriers have been considered and analyzed. Nevertheless, we consider that a main issue is the contradiction among the definitions proposed and the real support provided by platforms. In addition, there exist also different approaches to the concept by users and organizations. In this paper we call for a real open approach to the Open Educational Resource concept and introduce a platform where specific functionalities have been introduced to support its development.

Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) is being promoted and adopted increasingly because of the needs of current education, based on competences and student centered. At the same time, the use of technology for learning is now usual and also increasing. Nevertheless, current learning software offers poor support for SRL. Learners use different tools to organize their learning, to visualize content, to submit assignments, to answer questionnaires, etc. These functionalities are useful, but they are not relevant from the SRL approach. Particularly, monitoring students' development of SRL strategies and students' self-monitoring are not well supported in existing systems. This paper introduces a proposal to improve monitoring support in e-learning systems. The proposal is based on Tin Can API or xAPI, a recent standard to record data about users' activity in learning systems.

Edu-AREA is a Web 2.0 application whose main goal is to contribute to teaching innovation through open educational resources, activities and experiences. AREA provides information in the form of descriptions of educational resources and guidelines of activities that can be used by teachers to create their teaching guides and later to document their classroom experiencies. Teachers can explore the resources, activities, guides and experiences available, select the ones they prefer, create a copy and modify them adapting to their particular teaching context in accordance with a real open approach. At the current stage of the Edu-AREA development, a main issue is related to the management and classification of information provided by users. This paper introduces a folksonomy approach to tackle with this problem and analyses how to apply it in several elements of the Edu-AREA data model. In addition, a general view of the software architecture is provided.

In all the projects centered on the promotion of self-regulation, self-regulation strategies and learning strategies are taught, to enable the students to use them in order to improve their learning and self-regulatory skills. When the students use these strategies, they choose the tools that they want to use to implement the strategies, pen and paper in many cases, and generic software tools in other cases, as the range of specialized tools is very poor or they do not enable the implementation of the strategies more efficiently than the generic ones. The requirements of the support for self-regulated learning provided by a software tool are not clear. The goal of this paper is, on the one hand, to define the design criteria for tools intended to support self-regulated learning, based on the study of self-regulated learning theory and strategies, and on the other hand to discuss the evaluation of tools' capabilities for supporting self-regulated learning.

With the popularization of online repositories and content management systems, digital resources available to organize educational activities proliferate. Digital resources include many different possibilities besides content, like events, people, or hardware devices and software applications. We propose a conceptualization of the educational domain by means of an ontology aimed to comprehensively classify educational resources. This ontology may serve as the foundation of complex knowledge-based systems to assist teachers in the categorization, selection and retrieval of the most suitable resources for any educational activity in any educational scenario they wish to design and implement.

Edu-AREA is a web 2.X application that aims at supporting teaching during the whole life-cycle of lesson plans development, from design, facilitating the creation and the re-use of previous lesson plans, activities and resources provided by other users, to monitor and reflection, enabling teachers to register all types of evidences and comments. Edu-AREA also allows users (e.g., other teachers, students, parents) to comment and provide feedback to OLP. Accounting for these pieces of feedback will contribute to the detection of problems, the adoption of innovations and the implementation of effective improvements. In addition, the development of an appropriate recognition policy (e.g. badges for teachers) and the provision of "curation" facilities will support the identification of valuable educational resources, activities and experiences. In this contribution we show the main ideas and functionalities underlying this application.

While many innovations in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) have emerged over the last two decades, the uptake of these innovations has not always been very successful, particularly in schools. The transition from proof of concept to integration into learning activities has been recognized as a bottleneck for quite some time. This major problem, which is affecting many TEL stakeholders, is the focus of the four year iTEC project that is developing a comprehensive approach.

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.

Currently, Audience Response Systems (ARS) are integrated widespread on face-to-face classes to improve the attendance and engagement of the students. In this paper, we present the current trend of using Web 2.0 to provide ARSs and our efforts to create a complete ARS over a proprietary platform. We created a dedicated gadget to be used by the students as the traditional remote control system, which can be operated from any device with a Web browser (e.g. laptops, tablets or smartphones). With our approach, teachers can use gadgets to compose and make in-class polls or questionnaires and check the responses on-the-fly.

Content curation has emerged as a topic of interest in the last few years in the Internet. It aims at discovering and ordering interesting resources from the web, and sharing them with others. From the profile and past behaviour of users, new resources that may be of interest can be recommended to them. This paper discusses AREA, a content curation platform targeted at teachers, where they can aggregate into shareboards the resources that they find in the web. Those resources can be used in educational activities, which are the building blocks for composing sequences of activities, that are in turn the cornerstones of guides (lesson plans). The educational experiences that result from the use of guides are also contemplated in the platform. The key original feature of AREA is that it extends the concept of content curation, so that, not only contents, but also activities, sequences, guides, and experiences, in addition to other resources such as persons, events and tools, are first-class curable elements in the platform. Therefore, shareboards of teachers can include any of those elements; and all of them can be shared, commented, rated, and also recommended to other teachers.

This paper introduces the iTEC SDE (Scenario Development Environment), a recommendation system to assist teachers in the creation of lesson plans. A key functionality of the SDE is the recommendation of people. Basically, taking into account new pedagogical approaches, this system manages information about potential lesson plan contributors and provides recommendations on the best available people to participate in specific learning activities. The SDE has been developed as a multi-criteria recommender focused on supporting learning activities in particular technological and educational contexts. In this way, it manages information about the devices and applications available in the classroom and the features of the students, such as educational level, language, age, location, etc. The final goal of this system is to support teachers creating lesson plans in which they can develop new pedagogical approaches involving new technologies and external resources, such as people from outside the school. Eventually, this will contribute to engage students and improve learning.

Usually, e-learning involves dedicated platforms designed to support learning from static information and functionalities. We have been working towards a more dynamic e-learning platform following a decentralized approach based on iGoogle. Users are able to decide about the information and functionalities in the system through the management of gadgets (iGoogle widgets). In this way, iGoogle is transformed into a kind of Personal Learning Environment that can be controlled by final users. In this paper we introduce a set of gadgets to provide an appropriate learning support to different roles: student, author and teacher assistant. These gadgets can be combined with other existing iGoogle gadgets following the specifications of the iGoogle platform and the Open Social standard.

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.

Audience Response Systems can benefit the normal course of the classes. Dedicated Audience Response Systems can be quite expensive to purchase and maintain. Additionally, the question types supported are somewhat limited, usually only choice questions are available. In our previous works we have developed a set of OpenSocial gadgets that can be included in a personal iGoogle page. Our future work is centred in providing a electronic voting system based on gadgets with iGoogle using mobile devices as smartphones and laptops for voting.

iGoogle platform permits users to create learning environments rapidly and easily. We have developed a set of OpenSocial gadgets on this platform for this scenario, which are able to communicate with Web services offering learning activities to guide students through lesson plans. In the paper we describe the set of developed gadgets and present a brief description of how gadgets can be linked to a Web service.

Currently, Audience Response Systems (ARS) are integrated widespread on face-to-face classes to improve the attendance and engagement of the students. In this paper, we present the current trend of using Web 2.0 to provide ARSs and our efforts to create a complete ARS over the iGoogle platform. We created a dedicated gadget to be used by the students as the traditional remote control system, which can be operated from any device with a Web browser (e.g. laptops, tablets or smartphones). With our approach, teachers can use gadgets to compose and make in-class polls or questionnaires and check the responses on-the-fly.

Game·Tel is an open source software system that supports personalized learning, focusing on serious games and simulations, making these and traditional content accessible and adaptive to the student and educational context. In this paper we discuss about its design and functionalities, its modular architecture and the multi-environment approach.

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 idea of this project is to translate the principles of Web 2.0 to e-learning, enabling social participation and dynamic data exchange between users. We are working in the development of an i-Google Gadget, called Edu-GAL (Educational-Gadget Activity List), with e-learning services and its integration with other existing tools and gadgets on the i-Google platform. Edu-GAL will take advantage of a set of existing Web services that provide main e-learning functionalities. The project is located in the context of so-called Personal Learning Environments (PLE). Compared to traditional e-learning systems, in especially Learning Management Systems (LMS), PLE are more learner-centered as it is the user who defines and decides the environment at which he/she will learn.

E-Learning is as much or more related to learning than technologies, but technology specialists have been commissioned, often alone, to create specifications and standards for E-Learning, focusing much more on technologies than learning. Learning is an internal process that occurs in the minds of people, so it is always a personal process. As each student has their own cognitive style and learning preferences, a goal that began with the application of technology to education is the personalization of instruction. One of the main obstacles to automate personalization is the lack of specifications and standards for describing learning objects at different levels of granularity. This work extends the concept of Content Ecosystem, giving semantic definitions for each Educational Object in the hierarchy.

This paper investigates a chemical workflow enactment model that is intended to coordinate workflows of large set of activities on a large number of resources in a self-evolving nature, based on a chemical analogy. The concept of chemical workflow engine is introduced for a concurrent, self-coordinating enactment exploiting as much parallelism as inherently present. The concept is aimed at supporting a generalized workflow language without any restrictions, modeling most workflow patterns, separating data and control flow, supporting dynamic changes by multiple versions and instances. The paper presents the notion and model of the chemical based coordination.

This paper deals with the problem of improving the tailorability and extensibility of current Learning Management Systems by allowing them to use third-party tools. Nowadays there are several initiatives to integrate in e-Learning systems tools deployed by external providers following the Software as a Service distribution model. However, these initiatives achieve at best a very “soft” integration. In this article we discuss the issues that should be addressed to achieve a tighter integration between the Learning Management System and the tool, and put the focus on one of them: the remote management of permissions from the Learning Management System.

Contemporary approaches to ICT use in educational settings vary from simple scenarios of content management to highly structured learning processes supported by process engines. The latter approach is that of Educational Modeling Languages, which structure learning processes as a flow of tasks that are assigned to a certain user/group. From an extensive literature review, the main drawback that is hindering the adoption of this approach is that of the adaptation: learning processes are previously designed to be posteriorly enacted by a process engine. A simple change in the process definition due to a non foreseen situation entails to stop and enact it again. This is a mayor flaw of this kind of approaches, because of its excessive rigidity. In this paper we make a review of current state-of-the-art in process engines that support learning processes, and we propose an execution semantics that supports exception handling in learning scenarios.

In this paper we show an e-learning system that is offered following an E-learning-as-a-Service (EaaS) model. The e-learning system is based on the PoEML specification and it supports the instructional design and development of learning experiences in accordance with different pedagogical approaches. A main issue in this model is to enable the integration with third party systems. We adopt some interfaces proposed in recent standardization initiatives and provide middleware to facilitate the integration of the e-learning system with specific tools that can be used to complement the functionality provided by the system (e.g., simulators, games). This system is being developed in the context of a project whose purpose is to enable the combination of Web-based and IPTV learning experiences. This development will allow us to assess the EaaS model for the support of ubiquitous learning places.

Moodle is the most used of open-source learning management systems (LMSs). In relation with its support of collaborative learning, Moodle counts with a number of collaborative tools which allow participants to collaborate freely. The main drawback in current Moodle approach to collaboration is that free collaboration does not guarantee that learning is produced. To enhance the learning outcome, interactions among participants, as well as the information they interchange, have to be structured. These process-based collaboration structures are named learnflows, in analogy with the workflow domain. In this paper we propose a method to extend Moodle with learnflow capabilities, by using a generic-purpose workflow engine exposed as a Web service to execute the learnflows, and by doing the intervention at the Moodle side in an aspect oriented software development (AOSD) fashion.

Nowadays many LMSs are available providing a broad range of functionalities and services to support teaching and learning. These systems are appropriate for most common pedagogical approaches, but they are not suitable enough for collaborative and practice-based scenarios. EMLs were proposed several years ago in order to provide a general solution to this problem. Particularly, the well-known IMS learning design specification is intended to support the description or educational units in accordance with different pedagogies. Nevertheless, this language uniquely solves one part of the problem, as a corresponding LMS that process such descriptions is required. At this point the main concern is the large size of such a system, provoking high-development and maintenance costs. To solve this problem this paper introduces a modular-based LMS engine, based in a very structured EML, that facilitates the development of whole LMSs in an incremental and customized way.

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

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

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

This paper deals with a separation of concerns proposal for educational modeling languages (EMLs). Basically, it proposes to structure these languages in a way different from the one proposed by the IMS learning design (LD) specification, currently considered as the standard EML. We assume that the LD specification is very complex and it is difficult to develop design and runtime applications and to produce EML-educational materials. Therefore, our goal is to simplify the LD specification. The main idea is not to attain the modeling of educational materials as a whole problem, but to divide it in several separated parts that could be solved in a step by step way. We propose two different kinds of parts: perspectives and aspects

The objective of educational modeling languages (EML) is to provide a containment framework of elements that can describe any design of a teaching-learning situation in a formal way. In this paper we propose a methodology to evaluate how well an EML supports the realization of such descriptions. The methodology is based on the identification of perspectives and patterns. We consider perspectives as features of a learning situation that should be described by an EML and that can be analyzed separately. For each considered perspective, we study the patterns involved, i.e., the more frequent situations. Perspectives and patterns provide the criterions that constitute an evaluation framework. So far, we have focused the methodology in collaborative learning and in the IMS learning design specification.

Nowadays, there is a huge demand for group-based learning (GBL) pedagogies, involving learners in so-called "active" and "rich" pedagogies. We describe the basis of a meta-model to support the design of computer-supported GBL processes and scenarios. Such proposal is related with recent innovative developments in the e-learning domain: Educational Modeling Languages (EMLs) and CSCL scripts. An EML provides a framework of elements that supports the description of any design of a teaching-learning experience in a formal way, involving learning participants, resources, tasks, scenarios, etc. CSCL scripts are proposed as tasks processes that aim to facilitate GBL by specifying tasks in collaborative settings, eventually sequencing these tasks and assigning them to learners. Therefore, pedagogical designs may be processed by appropriate software engines to enact them, providing automatic management and coordination of the involved elements. The meta-model proposed in this paper is conceived as an initial step to create a new EML.

The Workshop for Learning Technologies, within the European Committee for Standardization (CEN/ISSS WS-LT), produced the Learning Technology Standards Observatory, a Web portal where those interested in the LT standardization process can get familiar with it, learn the main differences between related specifications, follow what is going on, what is planned for the near future and furthermore participate in the process itself. This paper presents the main functionalities and content areas within this site and how users can benefit from its use.

The objective of the IMS learning design (IMS-LD) specification is to provide a containment framework of elements that can describe any design of a teaching-learning in a formal way. It does not impose any learning approach and is pedagogical independent. In this way, learning designers can precisely prescribe the instructional and teaching strategies. The problem is how common teachers can develop appropriate IMS-LD contents. This paper presents an adequate design approach based on design patterns. Design patterns are being proposed in learning to facilitate the design activities from non expert users. We find these proposals valuable, but consider that additional efforts are required. We propose a language of design patterns for learning, hierarchical structured in several aggregation layers. In addition, we consider generative design issues to obtain IMS-LD materials.

We describe a set of modeling techniques for developing vertical applications in specific domains. Previous approaches are mainly focused on obtaining final applications. We propose a methodology to obtain standards-driven service architectures used to build those final applications. This methodology is based on the OMG's MDA (Model Driven Architecture), the Unified Software Development Process and recommendations by other authors like Bass et al. (1999). To test the proposed methodology we have chosen learning/training as our vertical application domain. Also, we have used CORBA as the implementation/deployment environment for the last phases of this experience work. As a result, we have developed a Domain CORBA Facility for learning/training, whose defined services have been derived from a strict and systematic software development process.

The learning technology standardization process is taking one of the leading roles in the research efforts into computer-based education. Institutions like the IEEE, the US Department of Defense and the European Commission have set up committees to deliver recommendations and specifications on this area. Their goal is to provide interoperability among heterogeneous systems and reuse of learning objects. From this standardization work, we propose am open and distributed architecture that identifies some common software services for the e-learning domain. Our aim is to contribute to this standardization process from the software perspective.

We present a layered component model to support Web-based collaborative applications. We show how this model lets programmers focus on the particular logic of their applications, avoiding most of the issues related to collaboration, access control, and network management. The proposed model is organized into three layers on top of a foundation composed of commercial-off-the-shelf services and standard Internet protocols. The service level provides a network-transparent communications layer, database access, and distributed data interchange. The component level offers typical collaborative services, like user management, auditing, user-oriented messaging, higher-level events, project management, and a bulletin board. The application level supports actual applications constructed using the services offered by the underlying layers. A Web-based educational application has been developed over this framework to illustrate the process. This tele-education system, which follows the recommendations of the main institutions involved in the learning technology standardization process, is the second contribution presented by the authors.

Abstract The Internet and the WWW have encouraged the adoption of a three‐tiered architectural style as the general framework for distributed computing. The thin client concept associated with this model is the most suitable for the WWW, because it can be easily mapped to the browser concept. Additionally, the separation of business logic (middle tier) and back‐end services enable further flexibility for the design of this kind of service. Nevertheless, the advent of platform‐independent software models like Java and the availability of common off‐the‐shelf services, like FTP or HTTP, offer new opportunities to more classical distributed computing models. In this paper we revisit the two‐tiered model for Internet environments, and show that the fat client (user interface plus business logic) may still be valid, at least in some environments. We propose two solutions to provide full FTP access from a Java applet. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.