A Social Learning Space Grid for MOOCs: Exploring a FutureLearn Case

Collaborative and social engagement promote active learning through knowledge intensive interactions. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are dynamic and diversified learning spaces with varying factors like flexible time frames, student count, demographics requiring higher engagement and motivation to continue learning and for designers to implement novel pedagogies including collaborative learning activities. This paper looks into available and potential collaborative and social learning spaces within MOOCs and proposes a social learning space grid that can aid MOOC designers to implement such spaces, considering the related requirements. Furthermore, it describes a MOOC case study incorporating three collaborative and social learning spaces and discusses challenges faced. Interesting lessons learned from the case give an insight on which spaces to be implemented and the scenarios and factors to be considered

Group formation in learning flow activities across virtual and physical spaces

Proceedings of: Across Spaces11 Workshop in conjunction with the EC-TEL2011, Palermo, Italy, September 21, 2011One of the main challenges in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning is group formation according to different types of polices that depend on the pedagogical method or/and the students' profiles, and the communication of the resulting group formation to the students and the flow engines that orchestrate the collaborative learning processes. This challenge is even more demanding when the learning flows are not only supported by computers but they also integrate activities taking place in physical spaces without the assistance of computing devices. In this extended abstract we propose to combine previous contributions towards the development of an integrated solution for supporting group management across IMS Learning Design compliant virtual learning environments and activities in the physical space, such as the classroom or the playground.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Learn 3 project (TIN2008-05163/TSI).Publicad

Herramientas basadas en rúbricas para el control y la evaluación de los Proyectos Final de Grado

[ES]El papel del Trabajo Fin de Grado (TFG) en Ingeniería es crítico dado que ofrece la oportunidad al estudiantado de integrar y aplicar las competencias, tanto específicas como transversales, desarrolladas a lo largo del grado. Sin embargo, dadas sus características académicas (personalizado de acuerdo con los intereses del estudiante, el número de profesorado implicado, la evaluación mediante un tribunal, etc.), la sistematización de la evaluación formativa y sumativa del BFP es un elemento considerado tan necesario como complejo. Para abordar la complejidad de ambos procesos hay múltiples iniciativas recientemente reportadas a la literatura que proponen el uso de rúbricas como herramienta para asesorar y monitorizar tanto el proceso como el producto. En este artículo analizamos la experiencia de la Escuela Superior Politécnica de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) basada en la aplicación de rúbricas como parte de una guía de evaluación (con apoyo de una herramienta web) para los TFG. Esta guía fue evaluada cuantitativa y cualitativamente tanto antes, como durante y después del uso de las rúbricas y los resultados obtenidos nos permitieron conocer su valoración en términos de utilidad, pertenencia, usabilidad y precisión. Los resultados nos llevaron a realizar cambios para aportar nuevas prestaciones a la herramienta web dirigidos a la integración de la evaluación de competencias transversales y específicas, así como el diseño de una versión de la rúbrica resumida para su uso a través de dispositivos móviles

The art and science of learning design: Editoral

Editorial for the "art and science of learning design" supplement. Introduces the learning design approach, considers some of the grand challenges associated with it, and presents the papers in this supplement

m-AssIST: Interaction and scaffolding matters in authentic assessment

Authentic assessment is important in formal and informal learning. Technology has the potential to be used to support the assessment of higher order skills particularly with respect to real life tasks. In particular, the use of mobile devices allows the learner to increase her interactions with physical objects, various environments (indoors and outdoors spaces), augmented digital information and with peers. Those interactions can be monitored and automatically assessed in a way that is similar to traditional objective tests. However, in order to facilitate a meaningful interaction with formative purposes, we propose that the assessment process can be assisted through scaffolding mechanisms that transform the mobile system into a ‘more capable peer’. In this context, this paper presents the m-AssIST model which captures the necessary emergent properties to design and analyse m-assessment activities. The model is used to analyse the benefits and limitations of existing m-test based systems. This paper discusses the importance of meaningful interactions, and the provision of scaffolding mechanisms to support formative and authentic assessment

Lecciones aprendidas trabajando hacia la calidad e innovación docente

Jornada de Innovación Docente: resultados y estrategias, celebrada el 29 de junio de 2017 en la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, donde se presentan algunos de los proyectos de innovación docente del curso 2016-2017

Learning analytics support to teachers' design and orchestrating tasks

Background: Data-driven educational technology solutions have the potential to support teachers in different tasks, such as the designing and orchestration of collaborative learning activities. When designing, such solutions can improve teacher understanding of how learning designs impact student learning and behaviour; and guide them to refine and redesign future learning designs. When orchestrating educational scenarios, data-driven solutions can support teacher awareness of learner participation and progress and enhance real time classroom management. Objectives: The use of learning analytics (LA) can be considered a suitable approach to tackle both problems. However, it is unclear if the same LA indicators are able to satisfactorily support both the designing and orchestration of activities. This study aims to investigate the use of the same LA indicators for supporting multiple teacher tasks, that is, design, redesign and orchestration, as a gap in the existing literature that requires further exploration. Methods: In this study, first we refer to the previous work to study the use of different LA to support both tasks. Then we analyse the nature of the two tasks focusing on a case study that uses the same collaborative learning tool with LA to support both tasks. Implications: The study findings led to derive design considerations on LA support for teachers’ design and orchestrating tasks

The added value of implementing the Planet Game scenario with Collage and Gridcole

This paper discusses the suitability and the added value of Collage and Gridcole when contrasted with other solutions participating in the ICALT 2006 workshop titled “Comparing educational modelling languages on a case study.” In this workshop each proposed solution was challenged to implement a Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning situation (CSCL) posed by the workshop’s organizers. Collage is a pattern-based authoring tool for the creation of CSCL scripts compliant with IMS Learning Design (IMS LD). These IMS LD scripts can be enacted by the Gridcole tailorable CSCL system. The analysis presented in the paper is organized as a case study which considers the data recorded in the workshop discussion as well the information reported in the workshop contributions. The results of this analysis show how Collage and Gridcole succeed in implementing the scenario and also point out some significant advantages in terms of design reusability and generality, user-friendliness, and enactment flexibility

Representing CSCL macro-scripts using IMS LD lessons learned

Extended version of Hernández-Leo, D., Burgos, D., Tattersall, C., Koper, R. Representing Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning macro-scripts using IMS Learning Design Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, EC-TEL'07, Crete, Greece, September 2007.This paper analyses how CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) macro-scripts can be implemented using IMS Learning Design (LD). CSCL macro-scripts are machine-readable collaboration scripts that structure the activities making up a learning process. In order to support a systematic analysis of the problem, we point out the requirements of CSCL macro-scripts for their representation using LD. These requirements include common collaborative learning mechanisms (group composition, role and resource distribution and coordination) and flexibility demands (such as flexible group composition). Each of these needs is described and illustrated by means of two examples proposed in the literature and which reflect the identified requirements well: Universanté and ArgueGraph Scripts. These scripts are used in the article to expose and exemplify the realization of the requirements using LD. The problem is approached from two angles – that of the LD notation itself and also from related tools and specifications. The paper positions related work and discusses the possibility of generalizing the lessons learned to the representation of CSCL micro-scripts

The Learning Design Studio in a 5-weeks MOOC format

The present paper reports on a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for teacher professional development that uses the Learning Design Studio methodology as a pedagogical framework. It explains the training activities and supporting technologies used and discusses the findings obtained weekly from the analysis of participants' opinions. MOOCs appear to serve the professional development needs of teachers quite well and the action-based process based on a set of design activities are perceived as a useful by educators