Supporting orchestration of blended CSCL scenarios in distributed learning environments

El diseño y gestión en tiempo real de escenarios de aprendizaje colaborativo soportado por ordenador (en inglés, CSCL) es una tarea compleja y difícilmente realizable por profesores no expertos, que en los últimos años ha dado en denominarse "orquestación". La presente tesis doctoral profundiza en este concepto de orquestación, y de hecho la primera contribución de la tesis es un marco conceptual para caracterizar la orquestación, destinada a su uso por científicos en el campo del CSCL, validado mediante dos paneles de científicos del CSCL. La tesis también propone los "patrones atómicos" como herramientas conceptuales para que profesores no expertos realicen dicha orquestación, y que se han validado mediante cuatro talleres con profesores de educación primaria y superior. Finalmente, se propone GLUE!-PS, una infraestructura tecnológica para el despliegue y gestión en tiempo real de escenarios CSCL, validada a través de talleres y experiencias auténticas con profesorado universitario.Departamento de Teoría de la Señal y Comunicaciones e Ingeniería Telemática2012-11-2

Towards efficient provision of feedback supported by learning analytics

Proceedings of: 2012 12th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2012). Rome, Italy, 04-06 July, 2012.Problem-based learning lab sessions shape a demanding environment, both for students as well for the teaching staff, due to the additional support required. This applies particularly to overcrowded classes. Under these conditions, some aspects do not perform well, like the efficiency of the provision of feedback and the orchestration of the session, jeopardizing the effectiveness of the learning activity. Based on empirical observation, a characterization of lab sessions has been carried out, integrating both qualitative and quantitative parameters describing the interactions that take place. Based on such characterization, a supporting tool is proposed to make use of the students' logs, learning analytics and visualization techniques for providing monitoring and awareness mechanisms for leveraging the detected problems and thus improving the learning and assessment processes.Research partially supported by the Spanish Plan Nacional de I+D+I projects “Learn3: Towards Learning of the Third Kind” (TIN2008-05163/TSI) and “EEE” (TIN2011-28308-C03-01), and the Madrid regional project “eMadrid: Investigación y desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid” (S2009/TIC-1650).Publicad

Monitoring for awareness and reflection in ubiquitous learning environments

Producción CientíficaDespite the educational affordances that ubiquitous learning has shown, it is still hampered by several orchestration difficulties. One of these difficulties is that teachers lose awareness of what the students perform across the multiple technologies and spaces involved. Monitoring can help in such awareness, and it has been highly explored in face-to-face and blended learning. Nevertheless, in ubiquitous learning environments monitoring has been usually limited to activities taking place in a specific type of space (e.g., outdoors). In this paper we propose a monitoring system for ubiquitous learning, which was evaluated in three authentic studies, supporting the participants in the affordable monitoring of learning situations involving web, augmented-physical, and 3D virtual world spaces. The work carried out also helped identify a set of guidelines, which are expected to be useful for researchers and technology developers aiming to provide participants’ support in ubiquitous learning environments

On the integration of digital technologies into mathematics classrooms

Trouche‘s (2003) presentation at the Third Computer Algebra in Mathematics Education Symposium focused on the notions of instrumental genesis and of orchestration: the former concerning the mutual transformation of learner and artefact in the course of constructing knowledge with technology; the latter concerning the problem of integrating technology into classroom practice. At the Symposium, there was considerable discussion of the idea of situated abstraction, which the current authors have been developing over the last decade. In this paper, we summarise the theory of instrumental genesis and attempt to link it with situated abstraction. We then seek to broaden Trouche‘s discussion of orchestration to elaborate the role of artefacts in the process, and describe how the notion of situated abstraction could be used to make sense of the evolving mathematical knowledge of a community as well as an individual. We conclude by elaborating the ways in which technological artefacts can provide shared means of mathematical expression, and discuss the need to recognise the diversity of student‘s emergent meanings for mathematics, and the legitimacy of mathematical expression that may be initially divergent from institutionalised mathematics

Learning Buckets: Helping Teachers Introduce Flexibility in the Management of Learning Artifacts Across Spaces

Producción Científicaechnology offers rich opportunities for learning across different physical and virtual spaces. However, most of current across-spaces proposals are either highly teacher-centered, inflexible in the students’ self-management of learning artifacts during the enactment, or allow the teacher little/no control of such students’ management of artifacts. Moreover, these proposals tend to be disconnected from the practices and tools that are usual in the classroom. How can we achieve a middle ground between keeping the teacher in control of across-spaces situations and, at the same time, providing students with a degree of flexibility to manage learning artifacts? Aiming to address such challenge we propose the notion of learning bucket, and the Bucket-Server, a system implementing such notion. A learning bucket is a container of learning artifacts which are generated and/or accessed across-spaces by the students during the enactment, according to constraints configured by teachers at design time. The responsive evaluation conducted, based on a feature analysis and a pilot study with experts, suggests that learning buckets can help evolve from teacher- to student-centered approaches, while maintaining the teacher in control of students’ actions. The evaluation also indicates that the Bucket-Server surpasses the support provided by alternative proposals to across-spaces learning.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Project TIN2014- 53199-C3-2- R)Junta de Castilla y León (programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación – Ref. VA277U14

Learning design Rashomon II: exploring one lesson through multiple tools

International audienceAn increasing number of tools are available to support the learning design process at different levels and from different perspectives. However, this variety can make it difficult for researchers and teachers to assess the tool that is best suited to their objectives and contexts as learning designers. Several of the tools are presented elsewhere in this issue. In this article, the aforementioned tools are used as lenses to view the same learning design narrative - an inquiry-based learning lesson on healthy eating aimed at secondary-school students - from different perspectives, in a manner inspired by the plot structure of Kurosawa's film "Rashomon". In modelling the lesson on five tools, we uncovered similarities and differences in relation to the challenges posed by modelling a particular learning scenario, the ease of implementation of the computer-interpretable products' output by the tools and their different target audiences and pedagogical specialities. This comparative analysis thus illustrates some of the current underlying issues and challenges in the field of Learning Design

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs

System Orchestration Support for a Collaborative Blended Learning Flow

Portable and interactive technologies are changing the nature of collaborative learning practices and open up new possibilities for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). Now, activities occurring in and beyond the classroom can be combined and integrated leading to a new type of complex collaborative blended learning scenarios. However, to organize and structure these scenarios is challenging and represent a workload for practitioners, which hinder the adoption of these technology-enhanced practices. As an approach to alleviate this workload, this paper proposes a proof of concept of a technological solution to overcome the limitations detected in an analysis of an actual collaborative blended learning experiment carried out in a previous study. The solution consists on a Unit of Learning suitable to be instantiated with IMS Learning Design and complemented by a GenericService Integration system. This chapter also discusses to which extent the proposed solution covers the limitations detected in the previous study and how useful could be for reducing the orchestration effort in future experiences.This work has been partially funded by the Project Learn3 (TIN2008- 05163/TSI) from the Plan Nacional I+D+I and "Investigación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías para el e-Learning en la Comunidad de Madrid” funded by the Madrid Regional Government under grant No. S2009/TIC-1650