Analysing the Impact of Built-In and External Social Tools in a MOOC on Educational Technologies

Proocedings of: 8th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning: Scaling Up Learning for Sustained Impact (EC-TEL 2013). Paphos, Cyprus, September 17-21, 2013MOOCs have been a disruptive educational trend in the last months. Some MOOCs just replicate traditional teaching pedagogies, adding multimedia elements like video lectures. Others go beyond, trying to engage the massive number of participants by promoting discussions and relying on their contributions to the course. MOOC platforms usually provide some built-in social tools for this purpose, although instructors or participants may suggest others to foster discussions and crowdsourcing. This paper analyses the impact of two built-in (Q&A and forum) and three external social tools (Facebook, Twitter and MentorMob) in a MOOC on educational technologies. Most of the participants agreed on the importance of social tools to be in touch with their partners and share information related to the course, the forum being the one preferred. Furthermore, the lessons learned from the enactment of this MOOC employing social tools are summarized so that others may benefit from them.This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness Project TIN2011-28308-C03-01, the Regional Government of Madrid project S2009/TIC-1650, and the postdoctoral fellowship Alianza 4 Universidades.Publicad

etiquetAR: Tagging Learning Experiences

Proocedings of: 8th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning: Scaling Up Learning for Sustained Impact (EC-TEL 2013). Paphos, Cyprus, September 17-21, 2013etiquetAR is an authoring tool for supporting the design and enactment of mobile context-based learning experiences based on QR tags. etiquetAR enables creating, managing, and sharing personalized QR tags attachable to any object or physical geographical location. Tags are digital layers of contextualized information that transforms any physical space into a digitally augmented learning environment. This demonstration paper presents etiquetAR first working prototype of this application. In particular, the paper details: (1) how etiquetAR web-based application can be used to edit a tag, associate different resources to it, and relate resources information to a particular profile for adaptive learning experiences; and (2) how users can access and contribute to the information hidden in the tags using the mobile-based application. This demonstration will show the audience how etiquetAR is a simple tool designed to encourage practitioners to create their own tag-based learning experiences.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness with the EEE project (TIN2011-28308-C03-01 and TIN2011-28308-C03-03) and by the eMadrid project (S2009/TIC-1650) funded by the Regional Government of Madrid. The authors would also like to especially thank the members of the research groups GAST (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) for their contributions and ideas.Publicad

ARLearn:Open source mobile application platform for learning

Börner, D., Ternier, S., Klemke, R., Schmitz, B., Kalz, M., Tabuenca, B., & Specht, M. (2013). ARLearn - Open source mobile application platform for learning. In D. Hernández-Leo et al. (Eds.), Scaling up Learning for Sustained Impact. Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2013), LNCS 8095 (pp. 536-539). Berlin Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. [The final publication is available at link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-40814-4_52]The paper presents and outlines the demonstration of an open source mobile application platform for designing, supporting, and evaluating mobile learning scenarios that make use of media artefacts in a specific context. The platform contains a web-based authoring environment, cross-platform mobile applications to run the scenarios, as well as tools to monitor progress and results. Besides exploring the pedagogical background, the paper describes the conceptual implementation as well as the technical infrastructure and lists the requirements for demonstrating the platform and all its components

Supporting Teachers in the Design and Implementation of Group Formation Policies in MOOCs: A Case Study

Producción CientíficaCollaborative learning strategies, which can promote student learning and achievement, have rarely been incorporated into pedagogies of MOOCs. Such strategies, when implemented properly, can boost the quality of MOOC pedagogy. Nonetheless, the use of collaborative groups in MOOCs is scarce due to several yet critical contextual factors (e.g., massiveness, and variable levels of engagement) that hamper the group formation process. Therefore, there is a need for supporting MOOC teachers in the design and implementation of group formation policies when implementing collaborative strategies. This paper presents a study where two instruments were used to explore solutions to this need: a guide to support teachers during the planning of the group formation, and a technological tool to help them implement the collaborative groups designed and to monitor them. According to the results of the study, the design guide made the teachers aware of the contextual factors to consider when forming the collaborative groups, and allowed teachers inform some configuration parameters of the activity (e.g., duration and assessment type) and the group formation (e.g., criteria and parameters needed to build the groups). The technological tool was successfully incorporated into the MOOC platform. Lessons learned from the findings of the study are shared and their potential to inform the design guide is discussed.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Projects TIN2014-53199- C3-2-R and TIN2017-85179-C3-2-R)Junta de Castilla y León (programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación - Ref. VA082U16)European Commission (Proyect 588438-EPP-1-2017-1-EL-EPPKA2-KA

Deeper Learning by Putting Students in Charge of the Problem Lifecycle

Participatory Learning actively engages students in every stage of the problem lifecycle (including crafting problems for peers, providing solutions, peer grading, and disputes involving self-assessment). This brief motivates and describes the emerging Participatory Learning approach. The discussion then focuses on several issues concerning motivating students, guiding them in conducting the various problem lifecycle tasks, and evaluating participation and learning

In-Time On-Place Learning

The aim of this short paper is to look at how mobile video recording devices could support learning related to physical practices or places and situations at work. This paper discusses particular kind of workplace learning, namely learning using short video clips that are related to physical environment and tasks preformed in situ. The paper presents challenges of supporting learning as part of work practices taking place in the workplace, because learning has different attributes during work than in formal educational contexts: e.g. it is informal, just in time and social. The theoretical framework of the design is the tradition of pragmatism. We start with the concepts of experience, change of practices / habits and reflection, claiming that living through experiences suggest changes for practices and these trigger reflective processing of the situations. We present an Android application ‘Ach So!’ for creating and annotating short videos as potential solution for informal learning for physical work practices. The paper ends in proposing future steps in the development of the application. The co-design process for the application is lean and iterative, where the design receives feedback from the project partners, skilled workers, apprentices and managers of SMEs targeted to be the main users of the application.Peer reviewe

The Application of Business Process Model Notation to describe a Methodology for the Recognition, Tagging and Acknowledge of Informal Learning Activities

[EN] Learning is a process that takes place anywhere and at any moment of our life. That means that not all learning happens linked to an institution. However, that kind of learning, known as informal learning, is usually invisible for people in charge of organizations. This is because either the learner is not aware of having learned something or because he/she is not able to show or make visible this type of learning to other. In order to facilitate the exploitation of this knowledge, TRAILER project poses a methodology supported by a technological ecosystem. This methodology is quite complex; it involves different stakeholders and components. For defining the methodology, a flexible and understandable notation was used, Business Process Model Notation. It helps in the designing and implementation of the solution and it also has been used to guide experts during the methodology testing

The antecedents of e-learning adoption within Italian corporate universities: A comparative case study

The implementation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in business education appears to be influenced by a number of organizational issues, such as culture and technological sophistication. However, extant research has had very little to say about the antecedents that shape the adoption and diffusion of ICT across companies. In order to shed light on the phenomenon under investigation, this paper presents a comparative case study between five Italian companies that have instituted a corporate university. By distinguishing companies in typical cases and deviant cases with regard to the extensive use of e-learning technologies, our findings provide some useful insights about the antecedents that make companies more or less prone to employ the new frontiers of technology in their CUs