De los recursos didácticos para el aula a los contenidos para espacios virtuales educativos con componentes activos y herramientas de autor

El uso de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación en los procesos educativos en general, y en la Universidad en particular, comienza a ser una realidad, al menos en apariencia y en infraestructura. Es cotidiano el uso de medios audiovisuales como apoyo a la tradicional lección magistral, así como la publicación de diversos materiales en diversos sitios web relacionados con la docencia. Sin embargo, un análisis más profundo de la situación quizás nos lleve a una realidad menos alentadora, donde el conjunto de los autores de contenidos didácticos no reúne todo el potencial humano que la Universidad podría ofrecer. En consecuencia el número de materiales didácticos se ve afectado negativamente, de modo que la calidad, organización y accesibilidad de los mismos es susceptible de importantes mejoras. Desde este artículo, apoyándonos en las experiencias desarrolladas en el Laboratorio de Diseños Educativos Multimedia y Teleeducación del Instituto de Ciencias de la Educación de la Universidad de Salamanca, se aboga por la necesidad de superar la mera creación de elementos docentes aislados y caminar hacia el establecimiento efectivo de verdaderos espacios virtuales educativos, que deberían estar soportados por componentes educativos activos y herramientas de autor para la población de dichos espacios con contenidos de calidad. En el caso de las herramientas de autor, defendemos que las interfaces autor-herramienta han de estar pensadas para facilitar el acercamiento como autores de contenidos a un personal que no tiene por qué ser experto en informátic

The WYRED project: A Technological Platform for a generative research and dialogue about youth perspectives and interests in digital society

García-Peñalvo, F. J. (2016). The WYRED Project: A Technological Platform for a Generative Research and Dialogue about Youth Perspectives and Interests in Digital Society. Journal of Information Technology Research, 9(4), vi-x

Educational hypermedia resources facilitator

Se analiza el impacto que la enseñanza en web ha tenido en la educación superior y las distintas herramientas que permiten la creación de documentos hipertexto como recursos de enseñanzaWithin the university the introduction of computers is creating a new criterion of differentiation between those who as a matter of course become integrated in the technocratic trend deriving from the daily use of these machines and those who become isolated by not using them. This difference increases when computer science and communications merge to introduce virtual educational areas, where the conjunction of teacher and pupil in the space-time dimension is no longer an essential requirement, andwhere the written text is replaced (or rather complemented) by the digital text. In this article a historical defence is made of the presence of this new standard in the creation of digital educational resources such as the hyperdocument, as well as the barriers and technological problems deriving from its use. Furthermore, HyCo, an authoring tool, is introduced which facilitates the composition of hypertexts, which arestored as semantic learning objects, looking for that through of a simple and extremely intuitive interface and interaction model, any teacher with a minimum knowledge of computer science has the possibility of transforming his or her experience and knowledge into useful and quality hypermedia educational resources

Teaching and Learning Tools for Introductory Programming in University Courses

Difficulties in teaching and learning introductory programming have been studied over the years. The students' difficulties lead to failure, lack of motivation, and abandonment of courses. The problem is more significant in computer courses, where learning programming is essential. Programming is difficult and requires a lot of work from teachers and students. Programming is a process of transforming a mental plan into a computer program. The main goal of teaching programming is for students to develop their skills to create computer programs that solve real problems. There are several factors that can be at the origin of the problem, such as the abstract concepts that programming implies; the skills needed to solve problems; the mental skills needed to decompose problems; many of the students never had the opportunity to practice computational thinking or programming; students must know the syntax, semantics, and structure of a new unnatural language in a short period of time. In this work, we present a set of strategies, included in an application, with the objective of helping teachers and students. Early identification of potential problems and prompt response is critical to preventing student failure and reducing dropout rates. This work also describes a predictive machine learning (neural network) model of student failure based on the student profile, which is built over the course of programming lessons by continuously monitoring and evaluating student activities

Increasing student motivation in computer programming with gamification

Games have important motivational power. They take advantage of a set of tools to encourage people to engage with them just for the joy of playing and the possibility to win. While gamification is gaining ground in a lot of areas in our society, its application in education is still an emerging trend. In recent years, gamification has attracted the attention of researchers from different areas such as teaching and learning computer programming. Ever since the first programming languages emerged, the problems inherent to programming teaching and learning have been studied and investigated. The theme is very serious, not only for the important concepts underlying computer science courses but also for reducing the lack of motivation, failure, and abandonment that result from student frustration. In most of these studies and research one factor prevails, lack of student motivation or how to motivate students to learn programming. One way to combat this problem is to use gamification. Using game design elements in non-game contexts is one of the good ways to motivate and encourage students to learn programming. To assess how gamification impacted the learning experience, we compared data from one gamified and non-gamified year. In general, the results show significant improvements in terms of attendance to class, participation, and proactivity. They also suggest that our approach can reduce the high rate of failure grade among students. In conclusion, this case study, we show how the use of concepts related to gamification can improve motivation, passion, beauty, joy, awe, e naturally the succeed in programming

Reference model for virtual education at face-to-face universities

El modelo de enseñanza no presencial cada vez está más extendido en la formación universitaria, incluyendo a las universidades tradicionalmente orientadas a la enseñanza presencial, con independencia de si estas son públicas o privadas. Muchas universidades se han creado ya con un modelo educativo orientado hacia la no presencialidad y, en los últimos años, volcado en una educación 100% online. En dichos casos, la estructura organizativa y docente de la universidad se orienta a esta forma de impartir docente, pero cuando una universidad de carácter presencial, con su propio dinámica e idiosincrasia, decide incorporar el modelo no presencial en su catálogo de titulaciones oficiales no puede duplicar sus estructuras organizativas y debe compaginar sus procedimientos tradicionales con los nuevos requerimientos propios de la oferta no presencial. Esta integración, si se desea tener éxito, debe hacerse desde una perspectiva estratégica que vaya desde el equipo de gobierno al resto de la academia, incluyendo al profesorado, estudiantes y personal de servicio. En este artículo se presenta un modelo de referencia que cada universidad presencial puede adaptar a sus necesidades y a su estratégica particular sobre cómo entiende y quiere abordar la docencia no presencialThe non-attendance education model is increasingly widespread in university education, including universities traditionally oriented towards face-to-face teaching, regardless of whether they are public or private. Many universities have already been funded with an educational model oriented towards non-attendance and, in recent years, turned to 100% online education. In these cases, the organizational and faculty structure of the university is oriented towards this form of teaching. however, when a face-to-face university, with its dynamics and idiosyncrasies, decides to incorporate the non-face-to-face model into its catalogue of official degrees, it cannot duplicate its organizational structures. It must combine its traditional procedures with the new requirements of the non-face-to-face offer. This integration, if it is to be successful, must be done from a strategic perspective that goes from the government team to the rest of the academy, including the teaching staff, students and service personnel. This article presents a reference model that each face-to-face university can adapt to its needs and to its particular strategy on how it understands and wants to approach distance learnin

Learner course recommendation in e-learning based on swarm intelligence

Se dan unas recomendaciones en la enseñanza asistida por ordenador (e-learning) basada en la inteligencia colectiva.This paper analyses aspects about the recommendation process in distributedinformation systems. It extracts similarities and differences between recommendations in estores and the recommendations applied to an e-learning environment. It also explains the phenomena of self-organization and cooperative emergence in complex systems coupled with bio-inspired algorithms to improve knowledge discovery and association rules. Finally, the present recommendation is applied to e-learning by proposing recommendation by emergence in a multi.agent system architecture

A Proposal to Define Adaptive Learning Designs

Abstract. This paper outlines a framework to describe adaptive learning designs where definitions as the instructional design method, the type of tests, the learning style approach, and the adaptive rules are not prescribed. Standardized metadata based on IMS is used to guarantee the reusability and interoperability of the elements. The framework proposes, also, to adjust the learning design taking into account the student knowledge and the learning style of both the learner and the learning activities by means of adaptive rule definitions. These rules are defined using a set of elements (based on IMS LD) and they describe adaptive statements, techniques and students’ stereotypes