Graduating live and on line: the multimedia webcast of the Open Universitys worldwide virtual degree ceremony

As the foremost international open learning institution, the UK Open University has now webcast two live and on-line degree ceremonies. Most higher education establishments routinely videotape degree presentations and many now broadcast these videos as ways of including remote family and friends who could not attend the physical event. In contrast, the UKOU has presented live ceremonies at which the graduands themselves, plus guests, family and friends were all remote and online! The first worldwide virtual degree ceremony took place at 15:00 GMT/UT on March 31st 2000. This ceremony was the first in the Open University’s calendar for 2000, and therefore the first formal ceremony of this leading open learning institution in the new millennium. The second online ceremony took place on 18th April 2001, and further ceremonies are planned as part of the routine of open learning

Adaptive Educational Hypermedia based on Multiple Student Characteristics

The learning process in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) environments is complex and may be influenced by aspects of the student, including prior knowledge, learning styles, experience and preferences. Current AEH environments, however, are limited to processing only a small number of student characteristics. This paper discusses the development of an AEH system which includes a student model that can simultaneously take into account multiple student characteristics. The student model will be developed to use stereotypes, overlays and perturbation techniques. Keywords: adaptive educational hypermedia, multiple characteristics, student model

Ontology technology for the development and deployment of learning technology systems - a survey

The World-Wide Web is undergoing dramatic changes at the moment. The Semantic Web is an initiative to bring meaning to the Web. The Semantic Web is based on ontology technology – a knowledge representation framework – at its core. We illustrate the importance of this evolutionary development. We survey five scenarios demonstrating different forms of applications of ontology technologies in the development and deployment of learning technology systems. Ontology technologies are highly useful to organise, personalise, and publish learning content and to discover, generate, and compose learning objects

On-Demand Learning in the Semantic Web

Learning processes need to be efficient and just-in-time for supporting the need-to-know of employees or learners. The efficient mechanisms for acquiring knowledge on demand are crucial for organizations to enhance the skills of their employees. This paper presents how semantic web technologies used for the description both of learning objects and learning models can be used for realizing the knowledge on demand paradigm

AHyCo: a Web-Based Adaptive Hypermedia Courseware System

Adaptive hypermedia courseware systems resolve the problem of users’ disorientation in hyperspace through the adaptive navigation and presentation support. We describe the AHyCo (Adaptive Hypermedia Courseware) - an adaptive Web-based educational system for creation and reuse of adaptive courseware with emphasis on adaptive navigation support and lessons sequencing. The proposed model consists of the domain model, the student model, and the adaptive model. The system is composed of two environments: the authoring environment and the learning environment

Desarrollo de software EUD centrado en el usuario final

Ponencia presentada en el XIII Congreso Internacional de Interacción Persona-Ordenador, organizado por AIPO en Elche, en octubre de 2012.Ponencia resumida publicada por ACM en inglés. Disponible en: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2379636.2379660Recientemente, el auge de las TIC ha motivado que usuarios no programadores hayan tomado un papel activo en el entorno de la computación construyendo y personalizando artefactos software, lo que ha provocado una tendencia que aboga por transformar al usuario final en programador o diseñador de proyectos software. Este hecho puede desequilibrar las competencias profesionales, introducir un factor de riesgo implícito y producir un impacto socio-económico importante. En este artículo se analiza esta problemática y se proponen directrices que permitan potenciar los principios de diseño y asistir al usuario final en las tareas más complejas de personalización de soluciones software relacionadas con su dominio, en vez de que éste acabe programando y/o gestionando proyectos software. Para ello, se introducirán tres herramientas de soporte, y se evaluarán con respecto a su usabilidad alcanzada para demostrar el alcance y adecuación de dichas herramientas para el usuario final experto en su dominio pero no en computación.The growth of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) has recently motivated end users, with no computer science skills, to take an active role in the computing world by building and customizing software artifacts on their own according to specific needs. This trend has gradually transformed end users into programmers or software designers, thus taking part in technical development activities. However, this fact may introduce a risk factor and produce a significant socioeconomic impact in the way software is produced by such users, unbalancing the roles of both programmers and end users by giving technical roles to unskilled users. This article discusses such issues and proposes guidelines for enhancing design principles and assisting end users in most complex parts of domain-software customization, rather than enabling the user to program or manage software directly. To this end, in this paper three supporting tools are introduced to provide end users with authoring environments to easily customize software. The tools have been created under a user-centered paradigm, also evaluated in order to measure its usability and demonstrate the scope and adequacy for the end-user’s domain.Esta investigación ha sido subvencionada por el Ministerio de Educación, proyectos TIN2011-24139 y TIN2011-15009-E

Videoconference in education at U.PORTO

The University of Porto (U.PORTO), through is New Technologies in Education (NTE) office has available since March 2005 a Videoconference Studio. This equipment is closely related do the dissemination of the videoconference technologies at U.PORTO. Only in the years of 2007 and 2008 this equipment has registered an increase of about 300% on his usage.Several efforts were developed by the NTE team that contributed to this high usage. We highlight especially the fluidity on the service, the multifunctional usage, the acquisition and the development of knowledge in this field and the internationalization of this service. Various educations scenarios were implemented during these past years using the videoconference infrastructure. We highlight the pedagogical scenarios that became long structured pedagogical projects with more than a year long. We had the example of a curricular unit from a Master degree between our Faculty of Economics and ISEG (Lisbon). In this case we had about twenty students in our Videoconference room during two semesters and the teacher was in Lisbon. Another example was a Doctoral curricular unit that happen between our Faculty of Sciences, IST (Lisbon) and Carnegie Mellon University (USA). In this case we had a teacher and about five students in Lisbon, one class of about five students in the USA and one student in our Videoconference Studio.Recently it was implemented a new telepresence room (Douro HD Room) in last July 2009 and we will join this year a portable videoconference system that will offer a complete and different set of options in the videoconference field to all the academic community. With different characteristics between them, these three equipments from U.PORTO will allow an optimization in the videoconference service offer in all the University.This segmentation on the types of videoconference contents that these equipments can give can also boost the usage of these infrastructures in the University but can also boost the pedagogical use of the videoconference technologies in all the academic community. In the past years several activities supported by the NTE team were developed in collaboration with several international institutions and even with the integration in international organizations with high experience with videoconference. This integration permitted to increase the knowledge in this field. This internationalization component was very important to the high intensity in the usage of the videoconference infrastructure in the U.PORTO.We can say that with this offer and this experience it's possible to create even more opportunities of usage, especially in the Videoconference Studio of U.PORTO (due to the multifunctional characteristics) on the usage to diverse, structured and constant pedagogical scenarios that can last several years