Implementação de ferramentas específicas ao Modelo Pedagógico da UAb na Plataforma Moodle

Encontro realizado em Lisboa na Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian e em Coruche no Observatório do Sobreiro e da CortiçaMostra-se como foi testada e adaptada a plataforma de e-learning Moodle na Universidade Aberta, de forma a por um lado suportar um elevado fluxo de estudantes, e por outro lado a implementar o Modelo Pedagógico da universidade aberta. A plataforma não ficou um sistema isolado, foi desenvolvida uma integração com o portal académico, outro sistema essencial ao funcionamento da universidade, facilitando o trabalho de docentes e funcionários que teriam de outra forma uma sobrecarga de tarefas que poderia comprometer o sucesso do modelo pedagógico. A comunidade Moodle não ficou sem contribuições nossas. Dois blocos de utilidade geral foram desenvolvidos em software aberto e disponibilizados no site oficial do Moodle. Explica-se primeiramente de que forma implementámos no Moodle o nosso Modelo Pedagógico, de forma simples e eficiente, resultando em mais de uma centena de docentes o tenha aplicado sem problemas. Segue-se a apresentação de um estudo de performance que fizemos à plataforma de forma a assegurar que esta tinha capacidade de resposta para o número de estudantes e nível de utilização que necessitamos. Como resultado, poucas foram as alturas em que docentes e estudantes deram pela plataforma, tendo estado em baixo apenas 2 vezes em todo o ano. Passamos de seguida a descrever a integração entre o Moodle e o Portal Académico, em que minimizamos as complicações e não necessitámos de alterar qualquer uma das aplicações. Esta integração não compromete qualquer das aplicações em futuros upgrades. Terminamos a apresentação com a descrição das duas ferramentas desenvolvidas em software aberto para a comunidade Moodle, uma de carácter mais visivel, informando "on-the-fly" o nível de utilização da plataforma, e outra de interesse para administradores, de forma a serem detectadas possíveis situações anómalas, antes que dêm problemas

A study on Moodle's performance

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are essential tools to the modern teaching institutions. Moodle is an open source LMS, widely used by open and distance teaching universities, as well as support to face to face courses. There are almost 40,000 registered Moodle sites, all over the world. Moodle can be installed in a wide range of environments: operating systems (Linux, Windows), supporting databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, ...), and hardware. This paper addresses the issue of Moodle’s performance within different environments, and under different loads. What is worth changing and what isn’t to improve performance? When load increases, what should be changed in order to obtain the largest performance gain? To answer these questions, it is important to subject the application, in a test environment, to the real conditions of use. In order to do it, we use historical data on the use of Moodle in Universidade Aberta. Several Moodle instances will be subject to different load levels and the resulting performance will be measured. It is difficult to estimate instantaneous load, even in a working site, where users’ habits are known. The number of users is an easier question to address and may be estimated by the number of teachers and students that will be using the LMS. So, in order to estimate future load, we present a conversion method according to the present level of use in this university

iMOOC : building a platform from existing software components

iMOOC is a new pedagogical model for massive open online courses (Teixeira & Mota, 2013), that evolved from UAb’s online model (Pereira et al., 2008), based on its four pillars of student-centered learning, interaction, flexibility and digital inclusion. It is also a software platform, that supports this model, and that was developed at UAb in close articulation with the pedagogical model. In this paper we describe the guidelines that oriented such development, and argue in favor of the use (or re-use) of well-established and robust software components for this purpose, as opposed to building platforms from scratch. The emergence of MOOCs as open courses, where participants have free access to the course, created new challenges in a closed, formatted LMS landscape. This led to the development of whole new environments that addressed those requirements (edX, Coursera). The iMOOC approach, however, was to build a platform from existing open source software components using an integration of Moodle (https://moodle.org/), which was previously adapted to UAb’s pedagogical model (Rocio & Coelho, 2009), and Elgg (http://elgg.org/), combining the advantages of both formal and informal learning modes, and addressing the pedagogical requirements in a cost-effective way. The integration was achieved using the IMS specification for LTI (learning tools interoperability) (Severance, 2010). As a result, the iMOOC platform has been successfully used both in stand-alone projects, and also in the european ECO project, where the effort to turn it project-compliant was relatively simple, due to the adoption of well-established protocols

A course template for undergraduate courses

We present in this paper a template for Moodle courses according to Universidade Aberta’s pedagogical model. The template for first cycle (undergraduate) courses enables teachers with little technical knowledge to deliver their online courses according to a pre-defined format. UAb's pedagogical model defines several features that can be directly implemented in a VLE, particularly in Moodle: course plan, learning card, assessment decision, and assignments, with proper configurations. This gave origin to a template that saves work and avoids technical problems caused by misconfigurations. Procedural guidelines were written to help teachers in their handling of the mechanisms implemented in the template. We found that the use of the template allowed teachers to concentrate on their pedagogical activity rather than on technical details. Some teachers that already had given online courses felt an improvement in their interaction with the VLE, since they didn't have to build things from scratch, especially those resources that weren't directly connected to their teaching activities, and were common to the University's model. An institution that is changing rapidly from paper-based distance learning to online learning must provide resources and mechanisms so that teachers and students may accomodate to the new model. Change, particularly the re-organization of the institution and the training of staff takes time, so any pre-configured package such as the proposed template is welcome

Implementation of a learning card in Moodle

A credit card is the metaphor for the learning card, a device used in 1st cycle courses, as established in our pedagogical model for online learning. Through it, the student accumulates points earned in assessment activities that contribute to the final evaluation in a course. In this paper we describe the implementation of this device through the adaptation and configuration of Moodle’s features. The new grades subsystem in Moodle 1.9 enabled us to configure courses to conform to our model. This gives both teachers and students the feeling of granting and scoring points in a card, as a reward for accomplishing the goals proposed in particular activities, as opposed to globally compute a final grade as a function of its components. Additionally, code changes to the standard assignment module software were necessary, to allow finer-grained grading. The new groupings feature was also exploited so that we can accommodate in the same space both students in continuous assessment and in final assessment modes. The end result of this work is a template course that easily allows teachers to start building courses according to the pedagogical model, avoiding complex parameter configuration

RLAD: Reinforcement Learning from Pixels for Autonomous Driving in Urban Environments

Current approaches of Reinforcement Learning (RL) applied in urban Autonomous Driving (AD) focus on decoupling the perception training from the driving policy training. The main reason is to avoid training a convolution encoder alongside a policy network, which is known to have issues related to sample efficiency, degenerated feature representations, and catastrophic self-overfitting. However, this paradigm can lead to representations of the environment that are not aligned with the downstream task, which may result in suboptimal performances. To address this limitation, this paper proposes RLAD, the first Reinforcement Learning from Pixels (RLfP) method applied in the urban AD domain. We propose several techniques to enhance the performance of an RLfP algorithm in this domain, including: i) an image encoder that leverages both image augmentations and Adaptive Local Signal Mixing (A-LIX) layers; ii) WayConv1D, which is a waypoint encoder that harnesses the 2D geometrical information of the waypoints using 1D convolutions; and iii) an auxiliary loss to increase the significance of the traffic lights in the latent representation of the environment. Experimental results show that RLAD significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art RLfP methods on the NoCrash benchmark. We also present an infraction analysis on the NoCrash-regular benchmark, which indicates that RLAD performs better than all other methods in terms of both collision rate and red light infractions

Estudo da avaliação de transformadores de corrente de alta tensão através da curva de excitação: [dissertação]

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia Elétric