Raising awareness of the accessibility challenges in mathematics MOOCs

MOOCs provide learning environments that make it easier for learners to study from anywhere, at their own pace and with open access to content. This has revolutionised the field of eLearning, but accessibility continues to be a problem, even more so if we include the complexity of the STEM disciplines which have their own specific characteristics. This work presents an analysis of the accessibility of several MOOC platforms which provide courses in mathematics. We attempt to visualise the main web accessibility problems and challenges that disabled learners could face in taking these types of courses, both in general and specifically in the context of the subject of mathematics

Facebook for e-moderation - a Latin-American experience

Social Network Sites such as Facebook are being now used by many academics for learning purposes, taking into account studies that report that a majority of young students spend more time insocially related online activities when compared to time in classroom. In online education there are mature models for creating and conducting learning experiences, one of them is the 5 stage e-Moderation model. In this study we created an experience of doing e-Moderation of a learning process in Facebook. At the same time a comparison of interactions and learning between Facebook and traditional online discussion forums in a learning management system is performed. The participants of the course setting are university professors from diverse countries in Latin- America. Outlined are findings in organization of learning activities, new social motivation artifacts and intrinsic social behaviors, information exchange difficulties, enhanced and increased interaction, positive knowledge construction, critical thinking and reflection development, therefore leading the study results into creating effective e-Moderation learning activities in Social Network Sites

Cloud-based Learning Environments: Investigating Learning Activities Experiences from Motivation, Usability and Emotional Perspective

Cloud education environments consider all the cloud services, such as Web 2.0 applications, content, or infrastructure services. These services form an e-learning ecosystem which can be built upon the learning objectives and the preferences of the learner group. A great variety of existing cloud services might be repurposed for educational activities and it can be taken advantage from already widely used services without steep learning curves on their adoption. In this article is presented the design, deployment and evaluation of learning activities using cloud applications and services. The experiences presented here are from Galileo University in Guatemala with students from three different countries in Central America and Spain. This study reports findings from motivational attitudes, emotional aspects and usability perception. Selected cloud-based tools were used for the different learning activities in three courses in various application domains. These activities include collaboration, knowledge representation, storytelling activities and social networking. Experimentation results obtained aim to demonstrate that students are eager to use and have new and more interactive ways of learning, which challenges their creativity and group organization skills, while professors have a growing interest on using new tools and resources that are easy to use, mix and reuse. Thus, future research should focus on incentives for motivating participation as well as on providing systems with high usability, accessibility and interoperability that are capable of doing learning orchestration

An Open Online Course with Accessability Features

Many universities are contemplating offering online courses in an open environment.This paper describes the early experiences of massive open online courses. One such experiencewas from Galileo University in Guatemala where open online courses was offered as early as 2005.Based on this experience and responding to two major European reports, Galileo Universitydeveloped an open online course that incorporate accessibility features. What this means is that thecourse will not only teach participants to develop a website incorporating accessibility features butthe online course itself will enable participants with disabilities to participate in the course. Thissituation has motivated us to initiate research to ensure that knowledge is transferred and thelearning activities are accessible by all ‘able’ and ‘disable’ participants. This paper outlines theexperimentation setup and report on the MOOC experience. Some initial results and findings arealso discussed

Automatic Test Item Creation in Self-Regulated Learning: Evaluating Quality of Questions in a Latin American Experience

The research area of self-regulated learning (SRL) has shown the importance of the learner’s role in their cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies to self-regulate their learning. One fundamental step is to self-assess the knowledge acquired, to identify key concepts, and review the understanding about them. In this paper, we present an experimental setting in Guatemala, with students from several countries. The study provides evaluation results from the use of an enhanced automatic question creation tool (EAQC) for a self-regulated learning online environment. In addition to assessment quality, motivational and emotional aspects, usability, and tasks value are addressed. The EAQC extracts concepts from a given text and automatically creates different types of questions based on either the self-generated concepts or on concepts supplied by the user. The findings show comparable quality of automatically and human generated concepts, while questions created by a teacher were in part evaluated higher than computer-generated questions. Whereas difficulty and terminology of questions were evaluated equally, teacher questions where considered to be more relevant and more meaningful. Therefore, future improvements should especially focus on these aspects of questions quality