Gaming behavior in online learning is a decisive factor when assessing student performance and achievements, where learners exploit system properties to answer questions or complete tasks without engaging with the course content and acquiring knowledge. As a result, it is essential for online learning systems to provide mechanisms that monitor the behavior of students and encourage them to engage with course content. Research has shown that adaptive notifications providing students with feedback motivate learners to engage with online learning. In addition, visualizations presenting progress, time spent on tasks and activities, and engagement levels have also been shown to support student engagement. This research analyzes whether the combination of adaptive notifications and visualizations may influence gaming behavior. It found that although most students benefitted from this combination, 14.3% of learners tried to artificially enhance their engagement levels.

A lack of appropriate engagement in online learning courses is a significant factor leading to poor performance and high dropout rates. This paper presents a framework that provides personalized motivations in the form of feedback, advices and reminders in order to enhance the engagement of students with online learning. It also describes the design, implementation and evaluation of the framework which has been used by over one hundred students. The paper focuses on how the framework by modelling and monitoring the level of engagement of students, it provides tailored motivations to stimulate and sustain their engagement. Finally, the paper compares the results from a previous student cohort (where no motivations were provided) to highlight how the framework has significantly increased the level of engagement of students.

Advances in pervasive technology have made it possible to consider large-scale application types that potentially span heterogeneous organizations, technologies, and device types. This class of application will have a multilayer architecture, where each layer is likely to use languages and technologies appropriate to its own concerns. An example application is a geographically large-scale crisis management system. Typically, such applications are required to dynamically adapt their behavior based on current circumstances, with adaptations potentially affecting all layers of the application. The complexities involved in dynamically adapting multilayer applications will significantly benefit from formal approaches to its specification. This article presents a new methodology for flexible, multilayer application adaptation, with layer-specific adaptation solution templates bound to application mismatches that are organized into hierarchical taxonomies. Templates can be linked either through direct invocations or through adaptation events, supporting flexible cross-layer adaptation. The methodology illustrates the use of different formalisms for different elements of its specification. In particular, we combine semiformal metamodeling techniques for the system model specification with formal Petri nets, which are used to capture template matchmaking using reachability analysis. This work demonstrates how existing formalisms can be used for the specification of a generic adaptation model for pervasive applications.

Service-oriented enterprise systems, which tend to be heterogeneous, loosely coupled, long-lived, and continuously running, have to cope with frequent changes to their requirements and the environment. In order to address such changes, applications need to be inherently flexible and adaptive, supported by appropriate infrastructures. In this paper, we propose a model-driven approach for the dynamic adaptation of Web services based on ontology-aware service templates. Model-driven engineering raises the level of abstraction from concrete Web service implementations to high-level service models, which leads to more flexible and automated adaptations through template designs and transformations. The ontological semantics enhances the service matching capabilities required by the dynamic adaptation process. Service templates are based on OWL-S descriptions and provide the necessary means to capture and parameterize specific behavior patterns of service models. In this paper, we apply our approach in the context of the EU-funded ALIVE project and illustrate, as an example, how the proposed framework supports the adaptation of the authentication mechanism used by an interactive tourist recommendation system.