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

Multimodal learning and teaching corpora exchange: Lessons learned in five years by the Mulce project

In order to make replication possible for interaction analysis in online learning, the French project named Mulce (2007-2010) and its team worked on requirements for research data to be shareable. We defined a learning and teaching corpus (LETEC) as a package containing the data issued from an online course, the contextual information and metadata, necessary to make these data visible, shareable and reusable. These human, technical and ethical requirements are presented in this paper. We briefly present the structure of a corpus and the repository we developed to share these corpora. Related works are also described and we show how conditions evolved between 2006 and 2011. This leads us to report on how the Mulce project was faced with four particular challenges and to suggest acceptable solutions for computer scientists and researchers in the humanities: both concerned by data sharing in the Technology Enhanced Learning community

Aerospace Medicine and Biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 192

This bibliography lists 247 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in March 1979

Collaborative trails in e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on collaboration within groups of learners, and hence collaborative trails. We begin by reviewing the theoretical background to collaborative learning and looking at the kinds of support that computers can give to groups of learners working collaboratively, and then look more deeply at some of the issues in designing environments to support collaborative learning trails and at tools and techniques, including collaborative filtering, that can be used for analysing collaborative trails. We then review the state-of-the-art in supporting collaborative learning in three different areas – experimental academic systems, systems using mobile technology (which are also generally academic), and commercially available systems. The final part of the deliverable presents three scenarios that show where technology that supports groups working collaboratively and producing collaborative trails may be heading in the near future

Developing key competences for life-long learning through virtual collaboration: Teaching ICT in English as a medium of instruction

This study presents the findings from a group of forty-nine fourth year undergraduate students who were trained in a blended learning environment over two months in order to acquire base knowledge and hands-on experience about information and communication technologies (ICT) and their possible applications to the EFL classroom. The course was taught in English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) and participants worked in a wiki designed specially to facilitate discussion and collaboration in the foreign language. Data were gathered from the participants' answers to an end-of-course questionnaire that featured eight five-point Likert-scale questions and five open-ended questions; quantitative and qualitative analyses were then performed upon the answers. Our findings and discussions elaborate on the impact the course had on the participants' perceptions regarding the acquisition of key competences for life-long learningThis research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (EDU2014-54673-R