Enhancing Orchestration of Lab Sessions by Means of Awareness Mechanisms

Proceedings of: 7th European Conference of Technology Enhanced Learning: 21st Century Learning for 21st Century Skills (EC-TEL 2012), Saarbrücken (Germany), 18-21 September, 2012Orchestrating learning is a quite complex task. In fact, it has been identified as one of the grand challenges in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) by the Stellar Network of Excellence. The objective of this article is to provide teachers and students with a tool to help them in their effort of orchestrating learning, that makes use of awareness artefacts. Using this powerful mechanism in lab sessions, we propose four different aspects of orchestration as the target for improvement: the management of the resources in the learning environment; the interventions of the teacher and provision of formative feedback; the collection of evidences for summative assessment; and the re-design of the activity, adjusting some parameters for future enactments. The proposal has been tested in a real course of Multimedia Applications with junior students (3rd course), measuring the benefits for the orchestration.This research has been partially supported by the project “Learn3: Towards Learning of the Third Kind” (TIN2008-05163/TSI) of the Spanish “Plan Nacional de I+D+i", the Madrid regional project “eMadrid: Investigación y Desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid” (S2009/TIC-1650) and the “EEE project” (TIN2011-28308-C03-01) of the Spanish “Plan Nacional de I+D+i"

Analysing, visualising and supporting collaborative learning using interactive tabletops

The key contribution of this thesis is a novel approach to design, implement and evaluate the conceptual and technological infrastructure that captures student’s activity at interactive tabletops and analyses these data through Interaction Data Analytics techniques to provide support to teachers by enhancing their awareness of student’s collaboration. To achieve the above, this thesis presents a series of carefully designed user studies to understand how to capture, analyse and distil indicators of collaborative learning. We perform this in three steps: the exploration of the feasibility of the approach, the construction of a novel solution and the execution of the conceptual proposal, both under controlled conditions and in the wild. A total of eight datasets were analysed for the studies that are described in this thesis. This work pioneered in a number of areas including the application of data mining techniques to study collaboration at the tabletop, a plug-in solution to add user-identification to a regular tabletop using a depth sensor and the first multi-tabletop classroom used to run authentic collaborative activities associated with the curricula. In summary, while the mechanisms, interfaces and studies presented in this thesis were mostly explored in the context of interactive tabletops, the findings are likely to be relevant to other forms of groupware and learning scenarios that can be implemented in real classrooms. Through the mechanisms, the studies conducted and our conceptual framework this thesis provides an important research foundation for the ways in which interactive tabletops, along with data mining and visualisation techniques, can be used to provide support to improve teacher’s understanding about student’s collaboration and learning in small groups

Boosting interaction with educational technology

Proceeding of: 2017 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), 25-28 April 2017, Athens, Greece.The MOOC movement has helped faculty in focusing on how to lecture. However, once this is done, it would not make sense not to use this content for on-campus classes. In this paper, we will explain how to harness top content created for MOOCs to improve on-campus classes, where the personal interaction is a key added feature. Interactive practices and on-site interaction, especially in-class interaction, are of particular relevance in the evolution of Higher Education towards a more effective learning.The eMadrid Excellence Network is being funded by the Madrid Regional Government (Comunidad de Madrid) with grant No. S2013/ICE-2715. This work also received partial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Project RESET (TIN2014-53199-C3-1-R) and fellowship FPDI-2013-17411, and from the European Commission through Erasmus+ projects MOOC-Maker (561533-EPP-1-2015-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP) and SHEILA (562080-EPP-1-2015-1-BE-EPPKA3-PI-FORWARD).Publicad

Adapting an Awareness Tool for Massive Courses: the Case of ClassON

Abstract: In this paper we analyse the challenges posed to teachers and students in massive face-to-face classes and explore how existing solutions can be applied to these contexts. In particular, we focus on classON 1 , a tool that provides teachers and students with the appropriate information to make the most out of face-to-face sessions in the computer lab. classON has been well tested in small-medium face-to-face lab sessions and we discuss some of its characteristics (current ones and foreseen) to adapt it to massive courses. As a result, we provide a set of recommendations for adapting tools to support massive face-to-face learning activities

Automated Injection of Curated Knowledge Into Real-Time Clinical Systems: CDS Architecture for the 21st Century

abstract: Clinical Decision Support (CDS) is primarily associated with alerts, reminders, order entry, rule-based invocation, diagnostic aids, and on-demand information retrieval. While valuable, these foci have been in production use for decades, and do not provide a broader, interoperable means of plugging structured clinical knowledge into live electronic health record (EHR) ecosystems for purposes of orchestrating the user experiences of patients and clinicians. To date, the gap between knowledge representation and user-facing EHR integration has been considered an “implementation concern” requiring unscalable manual human efforts and governance coordination. Drafting a questionnaire engineered to meet the specifications of the HL7 CDS Knowledge Artifact specification, for example, carries no reasonable expectation that it may be imported and deployed into a live system without significant burdens. Dramatic reduction of the time and effort gap in the research and application cycle could be revolutionary. Doing so, however, requires both a floor-to-ceiling precoordination of functional boundaries in the knowledge management lifecycle, as well as formalization of the human processes by which this occurs. This research introduces ARTAKA: Architecture for Real-Time Application of Knowledge Artifacts, as a concrete floor-to-ceiling technological blueprint for both provider heath IT (HIT) and vendor organizations to incrementally introduce value into existing systems dynamically. This is made possible by service-ization of curated knowledge artifacts, then injected into a highly scalable backend infrastructure by automated orchestration through public marketplaces. Supplementary examples of client app integration are also provided. Compilation of knowledge into platform-specific form has been left flexible, in so far as implementations comply with ARTAKA’s Context Event Service (CES) communication and Health Services Platform (HSP) Marketplace service packaging standards. Towards the goal of interoperable human processes, ARTAKA’s treatment of knowledge artifacts as a specialized form of software allows knowledge engineers to operate as a type of software engineering practice. Thus, nearly a century of software development processes, tools, policies, and lessons offer immediate benefit: in some cases, with remarkable parity. Analyses of experimentation is provided with guidelines in how choice aspects of software development life cycles (SDLCs) apply to knowledge artifact development in an ARTAKA environment. Portions of this culminating document have been further initiated with Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) intended to ultimately produce normative standards, as have active relationships with other bodies.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Biomedical Informatics 201

Algorithms for advance bandwidth reservation in media production networks

Media production generally requires many geographically distributed actors (e.g., production houses, broadcasters, advertisers) to exchange huge amounts of raw video and audio data. Traditional distribution techniques, such as dedicated point-to-point optical links, are highly inefficient in terms of installation time and cost. To improve efficiency, shared media production networks that connect all involved actors over a large geographical area, are currently being deployed. The traffic in such networks is often predictable, as the timing and bandwidth requirements of data transfers are generally known hours or even days in advance. As such, the use of advance bandwidth reservation (AR) can greatly increase resource utilization and cost efficiency. In this paper, we propose an Integer Linear Programming formulation of the bandwidth scheduling problem, which takes into account the specific characteristics of media production networks, is presented. Two novel optimization algorithms based on this model are thoroughly evaluated and compared by means of in-depth simulation results

An in-the-wild study of learning to brainstorm: Comparing cards, tabletops and wall displays in the classroom

© 2016 The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. Single display interactive groupware interfaces have the potential to effectively support small group work in classrooms. Our work aimed to gain understanding needed to realize that potential. First, we wanted to study how learners use these large interactive displays, compared with a more traditional method within classrooms. Second, we wanted to fill gaps in the current understanding of the effectiveness of interactive tables versus walls. Third, we wanted to do this out of the laboratory setting, in authentic classrooms, with their associated constraints. We conducted an in-the-wild study, with 51 design students, working in 14 groups, learning the brainstorming technique. Each group practiced brainstorming in three classrooms: one with vertical displays (walls); another with multi-touch tabletops; and the third with pens and index cards. The published literature suggested that tabletops would be better than the other conditions for key factors of cooperative participation, mutual awareness, maintaining interest and affective measures. Contrary to this, we found that the horizontal and vertical displays both had similar levels of benefit over the conventional method. It was only for affective measures that tabletops were better than walls. All conditions were similar for our several measures of outcome quality. We discuss the implications of our findings for designing future classrooms

The promotion of assets in the community

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