Análise das propriedades psicométricas da versão portuguesa de um instrumento de avaliação de e-Literacia em Saúde

Contexto: As fontes de informação eletrónica assumem um papel primordial nos contextos de informação em saúde, tornando-se fontes privilegiadas para toda a população, sobretudo adolescentes. Objetivos: Validar a eHealth Literacy Scale para a população portuguesa; conhecer os níveis de e-literacia eletrónica nos adolescentes, bem como a sua relação com variáveis sociodemográficas. Metodologia: Foi realizado um estudo quantitativo, descritivocorrelacional, retrospetivo e transversal, utilizando uma amostra não probabilística de 1215 adolescentes. Resultados: A escala apresenta bons valores de consistência interna, bem como correlação entre todos os itens, maioritariamente moderada e estatisticamente muito significativa. Foram encontradas diferenças nalguns itens entre rapazes e raparigas. Adolescentes em anos de escolaridade mais avançados reconheceram não saber onde encontrar recursos sobre saúde na internet, em relação aos que frequentam níveis de escolaridade inferior. Conclusão: Os adolescentes da amostra apresentam bons níveis de e-literacia em saúde. Incluir o desenvolvimento desta literacia nos programas de saúde escolar, permitirá aos jovens adquirir as competências necessárias para uma boa tomada de decisão e promover a saúde no futuro.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

As intranets como valor acrescentado para uma empresa

Uma empresa como organizaçao economica e social gera e manuseia diversos recursos de informaçao, que poderao ser obtidos e disponibilizados a toda a comunidade envolvente usando os serviços oferecidos pela infra-estrutura da Internet. Neste sentido, a instalaçao de uma rede empresarial baseada na tecnologia Internet e na Web (Intranet) introduz como vantagens imediatas a partilha alargada de recursos (de informaçao e computacionais) e a circulaçao eficiente de informaçao interna, atraves do uso de um conjunto de serviços estavel, fiavel e abrangente. Uma Intranet e' tambem um elemento relevante para a competitividade da empresa, pois para alem de constituir um sinal de modernizaçao, proporciona um mercado global e e' um veiculo privilegiado de cooperaçao interna e externa. Este documento pretende ser uma reflexao sobre o papel das Intranets para a empresa, discutindo os beneficios, os custos e os riscos relacionados com a sua implementaçao

Modelling an e-learning environment for learning programming languages

It is widely accepted that solving programming exercises is fundamental to learn how to program. Nevertheless, solving exercises is only effective if students receive an assessment on their work. An exercise solved wrong will consolidate a false belief, and without feedback many students will not be able to overcome their difficulties. However, creating, managing and accessing a large number of exercises, covering all the points in the curricula of a programming course, in classes with large number of students, can be a daunting task without the appropriated tools working in unison. This involves a diversity of tools, from the environments where programs are coded, to automatic program evaluators providing feedback on the attempts of students, passing through the authoring, management and sequencing of programming exercises as learning objects. We believe that the integration of these tools will have a great impact in acquiring programming skills. Our research objective is to manage and coordinate a network of eLearning systems where students can solve computer programming exercises. Networks of this kind include systems such as learning management systems (LMS), evaluation engines (EE), learning objects repositories (LOR) and exercise resolution environments (ERE). Our strategy to achieve the interoperability among these tools is based on a shared definition of programming exercise as a Learning Object (LO)

A programming exercise evaluation service for Mooshak

In this paper we describe the modelling and design phases of a web service to expose the evaluation functions of Mooshak - a contest management web system that is being used also as an eLearning tool for computer science courses. The purpose of exposing the evaluation functions of Mooshak as services is the integration with other systems that do not require its web interface. A Learning Management System (LMS) is an example of such systems. An LMS plugin can embed a program editor on its web interface and use such a service to evaluate students’ programs. A similar example is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with a plugin supporting direct submission to Mooshak

Bridging between programming exercises formats with BabeLO

Assessment plays a vital role in learning. This is certainly the case with assessment of computer programs, both in curricular and competitive learning. The lack of a standard – or at least a widely used format – creates a modern Ba- bel tower made of Learning Objects, of assessment items that cannot be shared among automatic assessment systems. These systems whose interoperability is hindered by the lack of a common format include contest management systems, evaluation engines, repositories of learning objects and authoring tools. A prag- matical approach to remedy this problem is to create a service to convert among existing formats. A kind of translation service specialized in programming prob- lems formats. To convert programming exercises on-the-fly among the most used formats is the purpose of the BabeLO – a service to cope with the existing Babel of Learning Object formats for programming exercises. BabeLO was designed as a service to act as a middleware in a network of systems typically used in auto- matic assessment of programs. It provides support for multiple exercise formats and can be used by: evaluation engines to assess exercises regardless of its format; repositories to import exercises from various sources; authoring systems to create exercises in multiple formats or based on exercises from other sources. This paper analyses several of existing formats to highlight both their differ- ences and their similar features. Based on this analysis it presents an approach to extensible format conversion. It presents also the features of PExIL, the pivotal format in which the conversion is based; and the function definitions of the proposed service – BabeLO. Details on the design and implementation of BabeLO, including the service API and the interfaces required to extend the conversion to a new format, are also provided. To evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach this paper reports on two actual uses of BabeLO: to relocate exercises to a different repository; and to use an evaluation engine in a network of heterogeneous systems

PExIL: Programming Exercises Interoperability Language

Several standards appeared in recent years to formalize the metadata of learning objects, but they are still insufficient to fully describe a specialized domain. In particular, the programming exercise domain requires interdependent resources (e.g. test cases, solution programs, exercise description) usually processed by different services in the programming exercise life-cycle. Moreover, the manual creation of these resources is time-consuming and error-prone leading to what is an obstacle to the fast development of programming exercises of good quality. This paper focuses on the definition of an XML dialect called PExIL (Programming Exercises Interoperability Language). The aim of PExIL is to consolidate all the data required in the programming exercise life-cycle, from when it is created to when it is graded, covering also the resolution, the evaluation and the feedback. We introduce the XML Schema used to formalize the relevant data of the programming exercise life-cycle. The validation of this approach is made through the evaluation of the usefulness and expressiveness of the PExIL definition. In the former we present the tools that consume the PExIL definition to automatically generate the specialized resources. In the latter we use the PExIL definition to capture all the constraints of a set of programming exercises stored in a learning objects repository

Schem@Doc: a web-based XML schema visualizer

XML Schema is one of the most used specifications for defining types of XML documents. It provides an extensive set of primitive data types, ways to extend and reuse definitions and an XML syntax that simplifies automatic manipulation. However, many features that make XML Schema Definitions (XSD) so interesting also make them rather cumbersome to read. Several tools to visualize and browse schema definitions have been proposed to cope with this issue. The novel approach proposed in this paper is to base XSD visualization and navigation on the XML document itself, using solely the web browser, without requiring a pre-processing step or an intermediate representation. We present the design and implementation of a web-based XML Schema browser called schem@Doc that operates over the XSD file itself. With this approach, XSD visualization is synchronized with the source file and always reflects its current state. This tool fits well in the schema development process and is easy to integrate in web repositories containing large numbers of XSD files.European Commisssio

An engine for generating XSLT from examples

XSLT is a powerful and widely used language for transforming XML documents. However its power and complexity can be overwhelming for novice or infrequent users, many of which simply give up on using this language. On the other hand, many XSLT programs of practical use are simple enough to be automatically inferred from examples of source and target documents. An inferred XSLT program is seldom adequate for production usage but can be used as a skeleton of the final program, or at least as scaffolding in the process of coding it. It should be noted that the authors do not claim that XSLT programs, in general, can be inferred from examples. The aim of Vishnu - the XSLT generator engine described in this paper – is to produce XSLT programs for processing documents similar to the given examples and with enough readability to be easily understood by a programmer not familiar with the language. The architecture of Vishnu is composed by a graphical editor and a programming engine. In this paper we focus on the editor as a GWT web application where the programmer loads and edits document examples and pairs their content using graphical primitives. The programming engine receives the data collected by the editor and produces an XSLT program

BabeLO : an extensible converter of programming exercises formats

In the last two decades, there was a proliferation of programming exercise formats that hinders interoperability in automatic assessment. In the lack of a widely accepted standard, a pragmatic solution is to convert content among the existing formats. BabeLO is a programming exercise converter providing services to a network of heterogeneous e-learning systems such as contest management systems, programming exercise authoring tools, evaluation engines and repositories of learning objects. Its main feature is the use of a pivotal format to achieve greater extensibility. This approach simplifies the extension to other formats, just requiring the conversion to and from the pivotal format. This paper starts with an analysis of programming exercise formats representative of the existing diversity. This analysis sets the context for the proposed approach to exercise conversion and to the description of the pivotal data format. The abstract service definition is the basis for the design of BabeLO, its components and web service interface. This paper includes a report on the use of BabeLO in two concrete scenarios: to relocate exercises to a different repository, and to use an evaluation engine in a network of heterogeneous systems

Modelling a network of heterogeneous e-learning systems

In recent years emerged several initiatives promoted by educational organizations to adapt Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) to e-learning. These initiatives commonly named eLearning Frameworks share a common goal: to create flexible learning environments by integrating heterogeneous systems already available in many educational institutions. However, these frameworks were designed for integration of systems participating in business like processes rather than on complex pedagogical processes as those related to automatic evaluation. Consequently, their knowledge bases lack some fundamental components that are needed to model pedagogical processes. The objective of the research described in this paper is to study the applicability of eLearning frameworks for modelling a network of heterogeneous eLearning systems, using the automatic evaluation of programming exercises as a case study. The paper surveys the existing eLearning frameworks to justify the selection of the e-Framework. This framework is described in detail and identified the necessary components missing from its knowledge base, more precisely, a service genre, expression and usage model for an evaluation service. The extensibility of the framework is tested with the definition of this service. A concrete model for evaluation of programming exercises is presented as a validation of the proposed approach