Library not found: The disconnect between gaming research and development

Video games clearly have great educational potential, both for formal and informal learning, and this avenue is being thoroughly investigated in the psychology and education literature. However, there appears to be a disconnect between social science academic research and the game development sector, in that research and development practices rarely inform each other. This paper presents a two-part analysis of this communicative disconnect based on investigations carried out within the H2020 Gaming Horizons project. The first part regards a literature review that identified the main topics of focus in the social sciences literature on games, as well as the chief recommendations authors express. The second part examines 73 interviews with 30 developers, 14 researchers, 13 players, 12 educators, and 4 policy makers, investigating how they perceived games and gaming. The study highlights several factors contributing to the disconnect: different priorities and dissemination practices; the lag between innovation in the games market and research advancements; low accessibility of academic research; and disproportionate academic focus on serious games compared to entertainment games. The authors suggest closer contact between researchers and developers might be sought by diversifying academic dissemination channels, promoting conferences involving both groups, and developing research partnerships with entertainment game companies

An exercise assistant for practical networking courses

Contains fulltext : 129381.pdf (preprint version ) (Open Access

Mastery Profiling through Entity Linking: to Support Project Team Formation in Higher Education

Computer-supported group formation enables educators to assign students to project teams. The focus in this paper is placed on gathering data about student attributes that are relevant in the context of specific course projects. We developed a method that automatically produces learner models from existing documents, by linking students to topics and estimating the levels of skill, knowledge, and interest that students have in these topics. The method is evaluated in an experiment with student participants, wherein its performance is measured on two levels. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to link students to topics with high precision, but suggest that estimating mastery levels is a more challenging task

Labour market information driven, personalized, OER recommendation system for lifelong learners

In this paper, we suggest a novel method to aid lifelong learners to access relevant OER based learning content to master skills demanded on the labour market. Our software prototype 1) applies Text Classification and Text Mining methods on vacancy announcements to decompose jobs into meaningful skills components, which lifelong learners should target; and 2) creates a hybrid OER Recommender System to suggest personalized learning content for learners to progress towards their skill targets. For the first evaluation of this prototype we focused on two job areas: Data Scientist, and Mechanical Engineer. We applied our skill extractor approach and provided OER recommendations for learners targeting these jobs. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 subject matter experts to learn how our prototype performs in terms of its objectives, logic, and contribution to learning. More than 150 recommendations were generated, and 76.9% of these recommendations were treated as useful by the interviewees. Interviews revealed that a personalized OER recommender system, based on skills demanded by labour market, has the potential to improve the learning experience of lifelong learners

An Investigation of the Impact of a Social Constructivist Teaching Approach, based on Trigger Questions, Through Measures of Mental Workload and Efficiency

Social constructivism is grounded on the construction of information with a focus on collaborative learning through social interactions. However, it tends to ignore the human mental architecture, pillar of cognitivism. A characteristic of cognitivism is that instructional designs built upon it are generally explicit, contrarily to constructivism. This position paper proposes a novel learning task that is aimed at combining both the approaches through the use of trigger questions in a collaborative activity executed after a traditional delivery of instructions. To evaluate this new task, a metric of efficiency based upon a measure of mental workload and a measure of performance is proposed. The former measure is taken from Ergonomics, and two well know subjective self-reporting mental workload assessment techniques are envisioned. The latter measure is taken from an objective quantitative assessment of the performance of learners employing concept maps

Translating the concept of goal setting into practice: What 'else' does it require than a goal setting tool?

This conceptual paper reviews the current status of goal setting in the area of technology enhanced learning and education. Besides a brief literature review, three current projects on goal setting are discussed. The paper shows that the main barriers for goal setting applications in education are not related to the technology, the available data or analytical methods, but rather the human factor. The most important bottlenecks are the lack of students' goal setting skills and abilities, and the current curriculum design, which, especially in the observed higher education institutions, provides little support for goal setting interventions