Heuristic Evaluation for Serious Immersive Games and M-instruction

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Two fast growing areas for technology-enhanced learning are serious games and mobile instruction (M-instruction or M-Learning). Serious games are ones that are meant to be more than just entertainment. They have a serious use to educate or promote other types of activity. Immersive Games frequently involve many players interacting in a shared rich and complex-perhaps web-based-mixed reality world, where their circumstances will be multi and varied. Their reality may be augmented and often self-composed, as in a user-defined avatar in a virtual world. M-instruction and M-Learning is learning on the move; much of modern computer use is via smart devices, pads, and laptops. People use these devices all over the place and thus it is a natural extension to want to use these devices where they are to learn. This presents a problem if we wish to evaluate the effectiveness of the pedagogic media they are using. We have no way of knowing their situation, circumstance, education background and motivation, or potentially of the customisation of the final software they are using. Getting to the end user itself may also be problematic; these are learning environments that people will dip into at opportune moments. If access to the end user is hard because of location and user self-personalisation, then one solution is to look at the software before it goes out. Heuristic Evaluation allows us to get User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) experts to reflect on the software before it is deployed. The effective use of heuristic evaluation with pedagogical software [1] is extended here, with existing Heuristics Evaluation Methods that make the technique applicable to Serious Immersive Games and mobile instruction (M-instruction). We also consider how existing Heuristic Methods may be adopted. The result represents a new way of making this methodology applicable to this new developing area of learning technology

Incorporating Digital Badges and Ontology into Project-Based Learning

The rapid development of technology makes learning goals much more complex, diverse, and keeping changing. In reality, each product of design must be 'ultimately particular', which complicates the holistic learning objectives of a technology training class in the school setting, and, in turn, it runs the risk of becoming disconnected in the minds of learners and teachers. In order to address this issue, a solution named DBOPBL (Digital Badges, Ontology & Project Based Learning) is put forward in this paper.published_or_final_versio

Fostering quality in MOOCs: a european approach

Societal, educationaland personal changes have brought Open (Online) Education in the forefront of the global learning setting. One of the most significant challenges behind the EU Modernization Agenda is for education to respond to the characteristics of future students and to new needs in society. According to the Europe 2020 agenda, 40% of young people should complete higher education studies by 2020. The entire European university sector witnesses an increase of student numbers. Conventional learning methods are suboptimalsolutions for these massive student numbers. Thus, important questions and issues arise: How can we anticipate increasing student numbers combined with the likelihood of lower funding? How should we combine online and traditional formats to devise sustainable university business-models? In order to address these challenges Europe is investing in flexible educational solutions as this is embraced by the EC in its Open Educational Resource (OER) agenda. During the last years Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) became very popular: Since the year 2008, when the first MOOC was provided, the number of MOOCs is constantly increasing. The year 2012 was considered as the "Year of the MOOCs". However, MOOCs and OER are a good solution as long as they retain a certain level of quality. So far, experience and practice are leading to an increasing debate about their quality as an educational tool. The high drop-out rates of MOOCs that are typically measured in traditional distance education courses as well as in all formal education settings are discussed causing requests for rebooting MOOCs and the research on them and their quality. This article addresses the open issue of integration of quality approaches and mechanisms into the design of MOOCs through the development of a European MOOC Quality Reference Framework (QRF). The MOOC QRF provides a generic, organisation-wide system to help Higher Education Institutions and external stakeholders to design, develop, monitor, evaluate and improve the effectiveness of MOOCs along with the quality management practices. Based on flexible, configurable quality criteria and indicative descriptors, monitoring and reporting is adapted to organisational needs. The article presents the structure and quality dimensions of the MOOC QRF.It is based on the first international quality standard ISO/IEC 40180 and currently submitted to the European and international standardization committee (CEN TC 353 and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36) for approval as first quality standard for MOOCs. The MOOC QRF is practical to encompass a wide range of approaches to quality assurance emphasizing that it is the quality of the outcomes that matters most in the design of MOOCs, thus leading to a new era of learning experiences in Europe.This article is supported by MOOQ, the European Alliance for Quality of Massive Open Online Courses (www.MOOC-quality.eu). The vision of MOOQ is to foster and improve quality in MOOCs leading to a new era of learning experiences. MOOQ is partly funded bythe European Commission under the following project number: 2015-1-NL01-KA203-008950.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Fostering quality in MOOCs: a european approach

Societal, educationaland personal changes have brought Open (Online) Education in the forefront of the global learning setting. One of the most significant challenges behind the EU Modernization Agenda is for education to respond to the characteristics of future students and to new needs in society. According to the Europe 2020 agenda, 40% of young people should complete higher education studies by 2020. The entire European university sector witnesses an increase of student numbers. Conventional learning methods are suboptimalsolutions for these massive student numbers. Thus, important questions and issues arise: How can we anticipate increasing student numbers combined with the likelihood of lower funding? How should we combine online and traditional formats to devise sustainable university business-models? In order to address these challenges Europe is investing in flexible educational solutions as this is embraced by the EC in its Open Educational Resource (OER) agenda. During the last years Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) became very popular: Since the year 2008, when the first MOOC was provided, the number of MOOCs is constantly increasing. The year 2012 was considered as the "Year of the MOOCs". However, MOOCs and OER are a good solution as long as they retain a certain level of quality. So far, experience and practice are leading to an increasing debate about their quality as an educational tool. The high drop-out rates of MOOCs that are typically measured in traditional distance education courses as well as in all formal education settings are discussed causing requests for rebooting MOOCs and the research on them and their quality. This article addresses the open issue of integration of quality approaches and mechanisms into the design of MOOCs through the development of a European MOOC Quality Reference Framework (QRF). The MOOC QRF provides a generic, organisation-wide system to help Higher Education Institutions and external stakeholders to design, develop, monitor, evaluate and improve the effectiveness of MOOCs along with the quality management practices. Based on flexible, configurable quality criteria and indicative descriptors, monitoring and reporting is adapted to organisational needs. The article presents the structure and quality dimensions of the MOOC QRF.It is based on the first international quality standard ISO/IEC 40180 and currently submitted to the European and international standardization committee (CEN TC 353 and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36) for approval as first quality standard for MOOCs. The MOOC QRF is practical to encompass a wide range of approaches to quality assurance emphasizing that it is the quality of the outcomes that matters most in the design of MOOCs, thus leading to a new era of learning experiences in Europe.This article is supported by MOOQ, the European Alliance for Quality of Massive Open Online Courses (www.MOOC-quality.eu). The vision of MOOQ is to foster and improve quality in MOOCs leading to a new era of learning experiences. MOOQ is partly funded bythe European Commission under the following project number: 2015-1-NL01-KA203-008950.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An Advanced eLearning Environment Developed for Engineering Learners

Monitoring and evaluating engineering learners through computer-based laboratory exercises is a difficult task, especially under classroom conditions. A complete diagnosis requires the capability to assess both the competence of the learner to use the scientific software and the understanding of the theoretical principles. This monitoring and evaluation needs to be continuous, unobtrusive and personalized in order to be effective. This study presents the results of the pilot application of an eLearning environment developed specifically with engineering learners in mind. As its name suggests, the Learner Diagnosis, Assistance, and Evaluation System based on Artificial Intelligence (StuDiAsE) is an Open Learning Environment that can perform unattended diagnostic, evaluation and feedback tasks based on both quantitative and qualitative parameters. The base architecture of the system, the user interface and its effect on the performance of postgraduate engineering learners are being presented

SERIOUS GAME : LEARNING DIGITAL FORENSIC ACQUISITION TECHNIQUES TO INCREASE COMMUNITY AWARENESS

One of the common causes of cybercrime is the lack of education and public awareness of cybercrime and digital forensics, such as acquisition techniques. So far, only a few people know in general the digital forensic acquisition technique, because learning about this acquisition technique is difficult to obtain and difficult to understand. This study aims to apply Serious Game as a solution in increasing understanding and at the same time promoting the importance of basic acquisition techniques in the world of digital forensics to the public. The method used in this study is the Design Thinking method, which consists of: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. The results obtained in this study are a serious game built using the Unity 3D application. There are several displays produced, including: splash screen, quests/challenges, instructions, simulation of acquisition techniques, selection of evidence, and quizzes. Based on the blackbox testing carried out, it was found that the application had been developed as expected

Digital Humanities Data Processing

The editorial of this first issue of volume 9, corresponding to 2016, is devoted to digital humanities data processing

Eportfolio as a Tool of Learning, Presentation, Orientation and Evaluation Skills

AbstractThese last years drove to many mutations of learning in training terms throughout life. The Moroccan universities began changing paradigm of education. This change consists in passing from a purely transmissive teaching paradigm to a learning paradigm where learners become the main actors of learning process and acquiring new skills and knowledge. Most of learning tools have adapted to this paradigm. Among these tools, there are the learning management system (LMS) and the electronic portfolio (ePortfolio). Our work focuses on monitoring and periodic evaluation of the formation of a student in higher education, particularly, the skills acquired by the student during his university education. Also we will show you other uses of the e-portfolio. From this perspective we suggest a computer device “ISIFePortfolio” which not only allows monitoring of learners, but also acts as an ePortfolio (electronic portfolio) assessment skills, and a social network combined systems. Based on the Mahara technology, “ISIFePortfolio” is an application set up by the team ORDIPU University Hassan II Mohammedia - Casablanca. It has been integrated into the platform of distance education “Education Master ISIF” for the master “Engineering Information Systems and Training.

Building and Analyzing a Corpus of Contextualized Traces Collected during a Technology Enhanced Teaching Module

International audience—Sharing and analyzing data collected within Technology Enhanced Learning environments is an interesting issue for researchers to validate their models and systems. In this paper we present a corpus we built and analyzed in order to validate our proposed " Proxy approach " as an approach for sharing and analyzing learning data corpora