Analyzing the behavior of students regarding learning activities, badges, and academic dishonesty in MOOC environment

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorThe ‘big data’ scene has brought new improvement opportunities to most products and services, including education. Web-based learning has become very widespread over the last decade, which in conjunction with the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) phenomenon, it has enabled the collection of large and rich data samples regarding the interaction of students with these educational online environments. We have detected different areas in the literature that still need improvement and more research studies. Particularly, in the context of MOOCs and Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs), where we focus our data analysis on the platforms Khan Academy, Open edX and Coursera. More specifically, we are going to work towards learning analytics visualization dashboards, carrying out an evaluation of these visual analytics tools. Additionally, we will delve into the activity and behavior of students with regular and optional activities, badges and their online academically dishonest conduct. The analysis of activity and behavior of students is divided first in exploratory analysis providing descriptive and inferential statistics, like correlations and group comparisons, as well as numerous visualizations that facilitate conveying understandable information. Second, we apply clustering analysis to find different profiles of students for different purposes e.g., to analyze potential adaptation of learning experiences and pedagogical implications. Third, we also provide three machine learning models, two of them to predict learning outcomes (learning gains and certificate accomplishment) and one to classify submissions as illicit or not. We also use these models to discuss about the importance of variables. Finally, we discuss our results in terms of the motivation of students, student profiling, instructional design, potential actuators and the evaluation of visual analytics dashboards providing different recommendations to improve future educational experiments.Las novedades en torno al ‘big data’ han traído nuevas oportunidades de mejorar la mayoría de productos y servicios, incluyendo la educación. El aprendizaje mediante tecnologías web se ha extendido mucho durante la última década, que conjuntamente con el fenómeno de los cursos abiertos masivos en línea (MOOCs), ha permitido que se recojan grandes y ricas muestras de datos sobre la interacción de los estudiantes con estos entornos virtuales de aprendizaje. Nosotros hemos detectado diferentes áreas en la literatura que aún necesitan de mejoras y del desarrollo de más estudios, específicamente en el contexto de MOOCs y cursos privados pequeños en línea (SPOCs). En la tesis nos hemos enfocado en el análisis de datos en las plataformas Khan Academy, Open edX y Coursera. Más específicamente, vamos a trabajar en interfaces de visualizaciones de analítica de aprendizaje, llevando a cabo la evaluación de estas herramientas de analítica visual. Además, profundizaremos en la actividad y el comportamiento de los estudiantes con actividades comunes y opcionales, medallas y sus conductas en torno a la deshonestidad académica. Este análisis de actividad y comportamiento comienza primero con análisis exploratorio proporcionando variables descriptivas y de inferencia estadística, como correlaciones y comparaciones entre grupos, así como numerosas visualizaciones que facilitan la transmisión de información inteligible. En segundo lugar aplicaremos técnicas de agrupamiento para encontrar distintos perfiles de estudiantes con diferentes propósitos, como por ejemplo para analizar posibles adaptaciones de experiencias educativas y sus implicaciones pedagógicas. También proporcionamos tres modelos de aprendizaje máquina, dos de ellos que predicen resultados finales de aprendizaje (ganancias de aprendizaje y la consecución de certificados de terminación) y uno para clasificar que ejercicios han sido entregados de forma deshonesta. También usaremos estos tres modelos para analizar la importancia de las variables. Finalmente, discutimos todos los resultados en términos de la motivación de los estudiantes, diferentes perfiles de estudiante, diseño instruccional, posibles sistemas actuadores, así como la evaluación de interfaces de analítica visual, proporcionando recomendaciones que pueden ayudar a mejorar futuras experiencias educacionales.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: Davinia Hernández Leo.- Secretario: Luis Sánchez Fernández.- Vocal: Adolfo Ruiz Callej

Spatial and temporal patterns of the stability and humidity terms in the Haines index to improve the estimate of forest fire risk in the Valencia region of Spain

Ponencia presentada en: IX Congreso de la Asociación Española de Climatología celebrado en Almería entre el 28 y el 30 de octubre de 2014.[EN]The assessment of risk index in the propagation and evolution of a hypothetical forest fire is commonly based on stability and moisture content at different atmospheric levels. The Haines Index combines these terms to determine the environmental potential for wildfire growth. In this study the environmental stability and humidity associated with the lower atmospheric layers in the Western Mediterranean Basin are investigated by analysing Haines Index calculations over a 29 year period.[ES]La evaluación del índice de riesgo en la propagación y evolución de un hipotético incendio forestal está basada habitualmente en la estabilidad y el contenido de humedad en los diferentes niveles atmosféricos. El Índice de Haines combina estos términos para determinar el potencial ambiental en el desarrollo de un incendio forestal. En este estudio la estabilidad ambiental y la humedad asociada a las capas atmosféricas más bajas de la cuenca del Mediterráneo occidental se investigan mediante el análisis del cálculo del Índice de Haines durante un período de 29 años.We thank NCEP/NCAR for supplying the data necessary for this study. This study was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Innovation and Science (projects CGL2010-16364, CGL2011-30433-C02 and GRACCIE Consolider-Ingeio 2010; and Dr. Niclòs "Ramón y Cajal"Research Contract) and Generalitat Valenciana (Prometeo/2009/006 FEEDBACKS project). The Instituto Universitario CEAM-UMH is partly supported by the Generalitat

A Survey on Data-Driven Evaluation of Competencies and Capabilities Across Multimedia Environments

The rapid evolution of technology directly impacts the skills and jobs needed in the next decade. Users can, intentionally or unintentionally, develop different skills by creating, interacting with, and consuming the content from online environments and portals where informal learning can emerge. These environments generate large amounts of data; therefore, big data can have a significant impact on education. Moreover, the educational landscape has been shifting from a focus on contents to a focus on competencies and capabilities that will prepare our society for an unknown future during the 21st century. Therefore, the main goal of this literature survey is to examine diverse technology-mediated environments that can generate rich data sets through the users’ interaction and where data can be used to explicitly or implicitly perform a data-driven evaluation of different competencies and capabilities. We thoroughly and comprehensively surveyed the state of the art to identify and analyse digital environments, the data they are producing and the capabilities they can measure and/or develop. Our survey revealed four key multimedia environments that include sites for content sharing & consumption, video games, online learning and social networks that fulfilled our goal. Moreover, different methods were used to measure a large array of diverse capabilities such as expertise, language proficiency and soft skills. Our results prove the potential of the data from diverse digital environments to support the development of lifelong and lifewide 21st-century capabilities for the future society

Analítica del aprendizaje y educación basada en datos: Un campo en expansión

The growing presence of digital mediation systems in most educational spaces —whether face-to-face or not, formalized or open, and at basic or lifelong learning levels— has accelerated the advance of learning analytics and the use of data in education as a common practice. Using digital educational tools facilitates the interaction between students, teachers and learning resources in the digital world, and generates a remarkable volume of data that can be analyzed by applying a variety of methodologies. Thus, research focused on information generated by student activity in digital spaces has risen exponentially. Based on this evidence, this special issue shows a set of studies in the field of data-driven educational research and the field of digital learning, which enriches knowledge about learning processes and management of teaching in digitally mediated spaces.La creciente utilización de sistemas de mediación digital en la mayoría de espacios educativos —ya sean presenciales o no, formales o abiertos, y tanto en el nivel de educación básica como en situaciones de aprendizaje a lo largo de la vida— está acelerando el avance de la analítica del aprendizaje y haciendo que el uso de la información digital sea una práctica común en el campo de la educación. Las herramientas educativas digitales facilitan la interacción entre estudiantes, profesores y recursos de aprendizaje, y generan de manera continua un notable volumen de datos que pueden analizarse aplicando una variedad de metodologías. Esto ha hecho que aumenten exponencialmente las investigaciones que toman como referencia la información que procede de la actividad de los estudiantes en esos espacios digitales. Partiendo de esas evidencias, este número especial muestra un conjunto de estudios en el campo del aprendizaje digital y la investigación educativa basada en datos, que enriquecen el conocimiento sobre los procesos de aprendizaje y la gestión de la enseñanza en espacios mediados digitalmente

Identifying Experts in Question \& Answer Portals: A Case Study on Data Science Competencies in Reddit

The irreplaceable key to the triumph of Question & Answer (Q&A) platforms is their users providing high-quality answers to the challenging questions posted across various topics of interest. Recently, the expert finding problem attracted much attention in information retrieval research. In this work, we inspect the feasibility of supervised learning model to identify data science experts in Reddit. Our method is based on the manual coding results where two data science experts labelled expert, non-expert and out-of-scope comments. We present a semi-supervised approach using the activity behaviour of every user, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), crowdsourced and user feature sets. We conclude that the NLP and user feature sets contribute the most to the better identification of these three classes It means that this method can generalise well within the domain. Moreover, we present different types of users, which can be helpful to detect various types of users in the future

El Proceso de Implementación de Analíticas de Aprendizaje

With the popularity takeoff of the learning analytics area during the last decade, numerous research studies have emerged and public opinion has echoed this trend as well. However, the fact is that the impact the field has had in practice has been quite limited, and there has been little transfer to educational institutions. One of the possible causes is the high complexity of the field, and that there are no clear implementation processes; therefore, in this work, we propose a pragmatic implementation process of learning analytics in five stages: 1) learning environments, 2) raw data capture, 3) data tidying and feature engineering, 4) analysis and modelling and 5) educational application. In addition, we also review a series of transverse factors that affect this implementation, like technology, learning sciences, privacy, institutions, and educational policies. The detailed process can be helpful for researchers, educational data analysts, teachers and educational institutions that are looking to start working in this area. Achieving the true potential of learning analytics will require close collaboration and conversation between all the actors involved in their development, which might eventually lead to the desired systematic and productive implementation.Con el despegue de la popularidad del área de analítica de aprendizaje durante la última década, numerosas investigaciones han surgido y la opinión pública se ha hecho eco de esta tendencia. Sin embargo, la realidad es que el impacto que ha tenido en la práctica ha sido bastante bajo, y se está produciendo poca transferencia a las instituciones educativas. Una de las posibles causas es la elevada complejidad del campo, y que no existan procesos claros; por ello, en este trabajo, se propone un pragmático proceso de implementación de analíticas de aprendizaje en cinco etapas: 1) entornos de aprendizaje, 2) recolección de datos en crudo, 3) manipulación de datos e ingeniería de características, 4) análisis y modelos y 5) aplicación educacional. Además, se revisan una serie de factores transversales que afectan esta implementación, como la tecnología, ciencias del aprendizaje, privacidad, instituciones y políticas educacionales. El proceso que se detalla puede resultar de utilidad para investigadores, analistas de datos educacionales, educadores e instituciones educativas que busquen introducirse en el área. Alcanzar el verdadero potencial de las analíticas de aprendizaje requerirá de estrecha colaboración y conversación entre todos los actores involucrados en su desarrollo, que permita su implementación de forma sistemática y productiva

Analyzing and testing viewability methods in an advertising network

Many of the current online businesses base completely their revenue models in earnings from online advertisement. A problematic fact is that according to recent studies more than half of display ads are not being detected as viewable. The International Advertising Bureau (IAB) has defined a viewable impression as an impression that at least 50% of its pixels are rendered in the viewport during at least one continuous second. Although there is agreement on this definition for measuring viewable impressions in the industry, there is no systematic methodologies on how it should be implemented or the trustworthiness of these methods. In fact, the Media Rating Council (MRC) announced that there are inconsistencies across multiple reports attempting to measure this metric. In order to understand the magnitude of the problem, we conduct an analysis of different methods to track viewable impressions. Then, we test a subset of geometric and strong interaction methods in a webpage registered in the worldwide ad-network ExoClick, which currently serves over 7 billion geo-targeted ads a day to a global network of 65000 web/mobile publisher platforms. We find that the Intersection Observer API is the method that detects more viewable impressions given its robustness towards the technological constraints that face the rest of implementations available. The motivation of this work is to better understand the limitations and advantages of such methods, which can have an impact at a standardisation level in online advertising industry, as well as to provide guidelines for future research based on the lessons learned.This work was possible thanks to the support of “Plan de Doctorados Industriales de la Secretaría de Universidades e Investigación del Departamento de Empresa y Conocimiento de la Generalitat de Catalunya” and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the Juan de la Cierva Formación program (FJCI-2017-34926). We also want to thank ExoClick for their support in conducting thisresearchPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Technology, computation and artificial intelligence to improve the web ecosystem

Postprint (published version

Suitability of Blends from Virgin and Reprocessed Polylactide: Performance and Energy Valorization Kinetics

A blending strategy of virgin and reprocessed polylactide may be postulated as an alternative to reduce the material cost at industrial level, and as a valorization route to plastic waste management of production scraps. The performance of blends prepared from virgin polylactide and polylactide mechanically reprocessed up to two cycles (PLA-V/R) was assessed in terms of thermo-oxidative stability, morphology, viscoelasticity and thermal kinetics for energetic valorization. PLA-V/R blends showed appropriate thermo-oxidative stability. The amorphous nature of polylactide was preserved after blending. The viscoelastic properties showed an increment of the mechanical blend effectiveness, which suggested the feasibility of using PLA-V/R blends under similar mechanical conditions to those of virgin PLA goods. Finally, it was shown that the energetic valorization of PLA-V/R blends would result in a more feasible process, due to the lower required activation energy, thus highlighting the advantages of the energetic demand for the process. In conclusion, PLA-V/R blends showed similar processability, service performance and valorization routes as virgin PLA and therefore could be relevant in the sustainable circular industry of bioplastics

Long-term properties and end-of-life of polymers from renewable resources

The long-term properties and end-of-life of polymers are not antagonist issues. They actually are inherently linked by the duality between durability and degradation. The control of the service-todisposal pathway at useful performance, along with low-impact disposal represents an added-value. Therefore, the routes of design, production, and discarding of bio-based polymers must be carefully strategized. In this sense, the combination of proper valorisation techniques, i.e. material, energetic and/ or biological at the most appropriate stage should be targeted. Thus, the consideration of the end-of-life of a material for a specific application, instead of the end-of-life of a material should be the fundamental focus. This review covers the key aspects of lab-scale techniques to infer the potential of performance and valorisation of polymers from renewable resources as a key gear for sustainability