Cognitive Effectiveness of Visual Instructional Design Languages

The introduction of learning technologies into education is making the design of courses and instructional materials an increasingly complex task. Instructional design languages are identified as conceptual tools for achieving more standardized and, at the same time, more creative design solutions, as well as enhancing communication and transparency in the design process. In this article we discuss differences in cognitive aspects of three visual instructional design languages (E²ML, PoEML, coUML), based on user evaluation. Cognitive aspects are of relevance for learning a design language, creating models with it, and understanding models created using it. The findings should enable language constructors to improve the usability of visual instructional design languages in the future. The paper concludes with directions with regard to how future research on visual instructional design languages could strengthen their value and enhance their actual use by educators and designers by synthesizing existing efforts into a unified modeling approach for VIDLs

Methods for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy Quantification: A Focus on Hands and Fingers Kinematics

Gastrointestinal endoscopy is a complex procedure requiring the mastery of several competencies and skills. This procedure is in increasing demand, but there exist important management and ethical issues regarding the training of new endoscopists. Nowadays, this requires the direct involvement of real patients and a high chance of the endoscopists themselves suffering from musculoskeletal conditions. Colonoscopy quantification can be useful for improving these two issues. This paper reviews the literature regarding efforts to quantify gastrointestinal procedures and focuses on the capture of hand and finger kinematics. Current technologies to support the capture of data from hand and finger movements are analyzed and tested, considering smart gloves and vision-based solutions. Manus VR Prime II and Stretch Sense MoCap reveal the main problems with smart gloves related to the adaptation of the gloves to different hand sizes and comfortability. Regarding vision-based solutions, Vero Vicon cameras show the main problem in gastrointestinal procedure scenarios: occlusion. In both cases, calibration and data interoperability are also key issues that limit possible applications. In conclusion, new advances are needed to quantify hand and finger kinematics in an appropriate way to support further developments

Design of a Flexible and Adaptable LMS Engine in Conformance with PoEML

This paper describes the support of the Structural, Functional, Order and Temporal perspectives in PoEML. PoEML is a modeling language devoted to support a broad range of pedagogical approaches, from content-based, to collaborative and practical oriented. At this point, a main issue is to provide a good level of adaptability and flexibility. The final goal is to support changes in the educational process development, enabling the provision of different learning experiences depending on the learning goals, the learner needs and features, the previous results, etc. The introduced solution is based on the separation of concerns principle adopted in PoEML. Basically, the solution facilitates the use of a set of educational resources in different ways by separating the form in which such resources are organized (Structural perspective) from the decisions of what has to be done (Functional perspective) and when (Order and Temporal perspectives)

Open Education with OER (OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES) Ecosystem

Nowadays, Information and Communication Technologies are becoming necessary in all types of organizations. That common occurrence makes it possible for people to be integrated into digital environments that require skills and constant updating. This man - technology relationship, makes the concept of Ecosystem to be adopted into educational technological field. Open education, e-learning, sharing open source or open source applications, open access research and open educational resources are becoming a worldwide trend. In this article we establish the relationship between Ecosystems, Open Education and OER (Open Educational Resources). We describe web initiatives to represent the OER Ecosystem and we present the InnovaREA model by using TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) as a basis. This proposal will be a methodological contribution what will help to improve the adaptation of the open education model through the OER ecosystem

Towards a Generalized Architecture for the Integration of Tools in LMSs

In this article we introduce the main components of a generalized architecture to facilitate the integration of tools in LMSs. This proposal tries to improve the reuse possibilities of the tools in e-learning systems. Reusability has been suggested as a key solution to reduce the high costs of the development of educational experiences in e-learning systems. Up to now, reutilization has focused mainly on the educational contents around metadata standards, contents formats, packaging systems, etc. However, educational practices usually involve tools to facilitate the communication, collaboration and work of students and teachers as well. This proposal is part of a wider solution based on the language PoEML, in which not only the possibility of the inclusion of tools in LMSs is considered, but also the management of its utilization

Execution Model and Authoring Middleware Enabling Dynamic Adaptation in Educational Scenarios Scripted with PoEML

The design of adaptive e-learning systems has been approached from different points of view. Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) conceptual frameworks, usually decompose this problem into separate concerns: a User Model (UM), an Adaptation Model (AM), and a Domain Model (DM). Regarding Educational Modelling Languages (EMLs), they provide adaptation mechanisms such as the modelling of participants following conditional learning paths over a common content structure. The design of adaptive learning paths in EMLs (the Adaptation Model) is predefined during design-time, and no changes on it are allowed during run-time. In this paper we describe the support of dynamic adaptation features (run-time changes on models) using PoEML (Perspective-oriented EML) as modelling language, with focus on the execution model of the PoEML engine and on a SOA-based middleware used by authoring tools to invoke change primitives

Recommender systems

The purpose of this chapter is to describe a software system that allows for discovering non-traditional education resources such as software applications, events or people who may participate as experts in some Learning Activity. Selecting the more suitable educational resources to create learning activities in the classroom may be a challenging task for teachers in primary and secondary education because of the large amount of existing educational resources. The iTEC Scenario Development Environment (SDE), is a software application aimed at offering supporting services in the form of suggestions or recommendations oriented to assist teachers in their decision-making when selecting the most appropriate elements to deploy learning activities in a particular school. The recommender is based on an ontology that was developed in a collaborative way by a multi-disciplinary team of experts. Its data set is fed not only from entries that come from registrations made by human users—using tools from the iTEC Cloud—but also from software agents that perform web scraping, that is, automatic enrichment of the semantic data with additional information that come from web sources that are external to the project. Therefore, the recommender system takes into account contextual factors when calculating the relevance of every resource. The SDE defines an API that allows third-party clients to integrate its functionalities. This chapter presents two success stories that have benefited from the SDE to enhance educational authoring tools with semantic web-based recommendations

The iTEC Data Model and Vocabularies

The <integer> is a positive integer, ending with two digits which are specific for objects generated by a given iTEC component. VocabularyTerm A VocabularyTerm is a term of a specific vocabulary. In the data model it is indicated as 'Term of' ...status: publishe