Effectiveness of MOOCs for teachers in safe ICT use training

Despite the efforts made, there is still an alarming difference between the digital competence that teachers have and the one they should have in order to develop their students' digital competence. The lack of teacher training in safe and responsible use of ICT is a special cause for concern. Online courses in MOOC format meet all the required conditions to offer a possible solution to the unavoidable and urgent need for initial and in-service teacher training in this area of digital competence. However, there is currently no evidence in the literature on the effectiveness of these courses for this purpose. This study examines the instructional effectiveness of courses in MOOC format for teacher training in the safe and responsible use of ICT by analysing three different official courses. The courses were analysed using three different methods: a questionnaire to measure participants’ perceptions, pre-tests and post-tests to measure the knowledge acquired, and LORI (Learning Object Review Instrument) to measure the quality of digital educational resources created by the participants. The results suggest that online courses in MOOC format are an effective way to train teachers in the safe and responsible use of ICT, and that these courses can enable the development of digital competence in the area of content creation

An easy to use open source authoring tool to create effective and reusable learning objects

Authoring tools play a crucial role in the development of learning content facilitating the creation of Learning Objects. However, not much work has been done in order to determine if educators actually can use these tools to create effective and reusable Learning Objects in an easy way. This paper address this issue by presenting and evaluating an open source authoring tool called ViSH Editor. Three factors were evaluated: the usability and user acceptance of the authoring tool, the quality and learning effectiveness of the created Learning Objects, and the reusability of these resources. Usability was evaluated through a lab test and the user acceptance with a survey among 180 users. Quality evaluation was conducted using LORI (Learning Object Review Instrument). The learning effectiveness was evaluated through learner surveys and test scores. Finally, reusability was evaluated by using the LORI instrument, by measuring metadata quality using a set of metrics, and by a quantitative analysis of reuse. Results show that ViSH Editor is an authoring tool capable of allowing educators to create effective and reusable Learning Objects in an easy way

Procedimiento formalizado para la incorporación de técnicas de usabilidad en el proceso de desarrollo Open Source Software

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Escuela Politécnica Superior, Departamento de Ingenieria Informática. Fecha de Lectura: 31-07-201

Simplifying, reading, and machine translating health content: an empirical investigation of usability

Text simplification, through plain language (PL) or controlled language (CL), is adopted to increase readability, comprehension and machine translatability of (health) content. Cochrane is a non-profit organisation where volunteer authors summarise and simplify health-related English texts on the impact of treatments and interventions into plain language summaries (PLS), which are then disseminated online to the lay audience and translated. Cochrane’s simplification approach is non-automated, and involves the manual checking and implementation of different sets of PL guidelines, which can be an unsatisfactory, challenging and time-consuming task. This thesis examined if using the Acrolinx CL checker to automatically and consistently check PLS for readability and translatability issues would increase the usability of Cochrane’s simplification approach and, more precisely: (i) authors’ satisfaction; and (ii) authors’ effectiveness in terms of readability, comprehensibility, and machine translatability into Spanish. Data on satisfaction were collected from twelve Cochrane authors by means of the System Usability Scale and follow-up preference questions. Readability was analysed through the computational tool Coh-Metrix. Evidence on comprehensibility was gathered through ratings and recall protocols produced by lay readers, both native and non-native speakers of English. Machine translatability was assessed in terms of adequacy and fluency with forty-one Cochrane contributors, all native speakers of Spanish. Authors seemed to welcome the introduction of Acrolinx, and the adoption of this CL checker reduced word length, sentence length, and syntactic complexity. No significant impact on comprehensibility and machine translatability was identified. We observed that reading skills and characteristics other than simplified language (e.g. formatting) might influence comprehension. Machine translation quality was relatively high, with mainly style issues. This thesis presented an environment that could boost volunteer authors’ satisfaction and foster their adoption of simple language. We also discussed strategies to increase the accessibility of online health content among lay readers with different skills and language backgrounds

Student perceptions on skills and learning challenges in the use of educational technology in a low-contact, blended and professional learning context: a grounded theory of ‘improvised learning’

This research project provides an original contribution to knowledge, comprising a grounded and unified theory of improvisational behaviours via Blended Learning and suggests a new paradigm of self-regulated, improvisational learning for potential application beyond the field of study. The study comprises an original Grounded Theory of ‘Improvised Learning’ demonstrating the most prevalent challenges, strategies and behaviours of students undertaking Higher Education programmes in a campus-based, low-contact teaching environment. The participant group were typically undertaking accredited professional programmes (usually related to a profession such as nursing or accounting). The students engaged in ‘Blended Learning’ i.e. study on-campus alongside use of learning technologies such as a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). The research project used Grounded Theory as an holistic methodology to investigate the experience of students in this study context. The main data collection phase consisted of informal individual or group discussions held in classes, open plan Library areas or IT Labs. Grounded Theory is a sociological methodology designed to formulate a new (Grounded) theory from a ‘substantive area’, i.e. a participant group typically comprising a shared vocational role or activity. Key elements of Grounded Theory include an emphasis on induction-based conceptualisation of theory from descriptive participant indicators and the continuous comparison of data for the emergence of ‘theoretical categories’ or codes. The ultimate aim of Grounded Theory is to demonstrate how conceptual categories inter-relate within a common theoretical explanation for the behaviour of participants (the ‘core category’). This grounded study of professional learners identified a number of theoretical models of behaviour for engaging with Blended Learning, including innovative self-led use of Information Technology and collaborative learning. The emergent ‘core category’ - reflecting all dependant codes or variables was defined as ‘Improvised Learning’, explaining conceptually how students employ self-led strategies and skills to engage with disparate systems, environments and resources