Big data: ¿Solución o problema?

Los que hayan leído o escuchado algo sobre el Big Data puede que se estén debatiendo entre la esperanza y la preocupación porque les surjan preguntas como ¿ayudará el Big Data a curar enfermedades? ¿O dará lugar a nuevas desigualdades médicas? ¿Contribuirá el Big Data a prevenir suicidios? ¿O se usará para rastrear los movimientos de los manifestantes en las calles? En las siguientes líneas tratamos de aclarar lo que significa el Big Data, de describir un mundo que está lleno de luces, y también de sombras, y presentar una panorámica, tanto de lo que el Big Data puede aportar en la construcción de una sociedad mejor, como de los problemas que puede genera

Using a SPOC to flip the classroom

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. G. Martínez-Muñoz and E. Pulido, "Using a SPOC to flip the classroom," 2015 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), Tallinn, 2015, pp. 431-436. doi: 10.1109/EDUCON.2015.7096007The benefits of using SPOC platforms into face-to-face education are yet to be completely analysed. In this work we propose to use SPOCs and video contents to flip the classroom. The objective is to improve the involvement and satisfaction of students with the course, to reduce the drop-out rates and to improve the face-to-face course success rate. We apply these ideas to an undergraduate first year course on Data Structures and Algorithms. The study is validated by collecting data from two consecutive editions of the course, one in which the flipped classroom model and videos were used and other in which they were not. The gathered data included online data about the students' interaction with the SPOC materials and offline data collected during lectures and exams. In the edition where the SPOC materials were available, we have observed a correlation between the students' final marks and their percentage rate of video accesses with respect to the total number of accesses, which indicates a better academic performance for students who prefer videos over documents.Authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Dirección General de Investigación project TIN2013-42351-P and from Comunidad de Madrid project CASI-CAM S2013/ICE-2845

Semiautomatic generation of Web courses by means of an object-oriented simulation language

This paper describes the procedure we have used to semiautomatically generate three different courses for the web. The simulation used in these courses have been written in our special-purpose object-oriented continuous simulation language (OOCSMP). A compiler we have written for this language automatically generates Java code and html pages, which must be completed manually with the text and images associated to each.This paper has been sponsored by the Spanish Interdepartmental Commission of Science and Technology (CICYT), project numbers TIC-96-0723-C02-01 and TEL97-030

An object-oriented continuous simulation language and its use for training purposes

This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the SESP '98 - 5th International Workshop on Simulation for European Space Programmes, on 3-5 November 1998, held in Noordwijk (Holland)This paper describes a language designed to write and generate object-oriented simulation code. The language is called OOCSMP, an object-oriented extension of the CSMP simulation language, also extended to solve partial differential equations using different methods. Programs are automatically translated into C++ and JAVA. Graphical user interfaces are automatically generated for various operating systems. The procedure is demonstrated by the implementation of models of gravitation as applied to the solar system and different satellite systems.This paper has been sponsored by the Spanish Interdepartmental Commission of Science and Technology (CICYT), project numbers TIC-96-0723-C02-01 and TEL97-0306

Dynamical object generation during the execution of continuous simulation models

This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the 3rd Argentine Symposium on Object Orientation (ASOO'99), held in Buenos Aires, ArgentinaThis paper describes the OOCMSP language, an object-oriented extension of CSMP, one of the most used continuous simulation languages of the seventies and eighties. The language is especially appropriate for models which can be decomposed into similar interacting components. The COOL compiler translates OOCSMP models into C++ and Java and can generate HTML skeletons which make it very easy to produce Web-based courses. With the appropriate compiler option, COOL also allows the addition and deletion of objects at execution time. The procedure is demonstrated by the implementation of a model of a geo-stationary satellite which keeps constant its distance to the Earth and a model of the inner solar system where the student can create and delete planets and study the effect of these changes on the rest of the solar system.This paper has been sponsored by the Spanish Interdepartmental Commission of Science and Technology (CICYT), project number TIC-96-0723-C02-01

Creación de cursos adaptativos en TANGOW mediante tareas, reglas y elementos multimedia

En este artículo se describe, en términos generales, el proceso de diseño de un curso adaptativo accesible a través de Internet mediante el sistema TANGOW. En este proceso de diseño se establece una clara separación entre la estructura del curso, para cuya construcción se utilizan tareas y reglas docentes, y la asociación de contenidos a esta estructura. A continuación se analizan los distintos tipos de adaptación que pueden definirse durante el diseño de un curso entre las que se incluyen la adaptación en función del perfil del estudiante, las dependencias teóricas y prácticas entre tareas y la creación de distintas versiones de un mismo fragmento de contenido. Se describen, también, distintas aproximaciones metodológicas que facilitan la labor de di-seño de cursos adaptativos. El artículo termina con algunas conclusiones y trabajo futuro.Este trabajo ha sido financiado por la Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT), con los números de proyecto TEL97-0306 y TEL1999-0181

An adaptive driving course based on HTML dynamic generation

Reprinted from the Proceedings of WebNet World Conference on the WWW and Internet 1999 with permission of AACE (http://www.aace.org).This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the World Conference on the WWW and Internet (WebNet '99) held in Honolulu (United States) on 1999In this paper we describe a new approach for developing adaptive Web based courses. These courses are defined by means of teaching tasks which correspond to basic knowledge units, and rules which describe how teaching tasks are divided into subtasks. Both tasks and rules are used at execution time to guide the students during their learning process by determining the set of achievable tasks to be presented to the student at every step. Adaptivity is implemented by presenting students with different HTML pages depending on their profile, their previous actions, and the active learning strategy. The HTML pages presented to the students are generated dynamically from general information about the type of media elements associated to each task and their layout. The whole approach is exemplified by means of a course on traffic signs

An object-oriented approach to task tree management in the TANGOW system

This paper describes the object-oriented features of TANGOW (Task-based Adaptive learNer Guidance On the WWW), a tool for developing Internet-based courses. This system facilitates the construction of adaptive learning environments for the WWW and is able to guide the students during their learning process based on student profiles and previous actions. In the TANGOW system, the course contents is modelled in terms of objects and relationships among them. This allows the course designer to reuse the same descriptive objects in different sections of the same course, or even in completely different courses. In addition, information about the student and his/her actions when interacting with the system is also stored as dynamic objects, which are instantiated at runtime. This makes it easy to access and update student related data.This paper has been sponsored by the Spanish Interdepartmental Commission of Science and Technology (CICYT), project number TEL97-0306

TANGOW: Un sistema de enseñanza adaptativa a través de Internet

Proceedings of the Congreso Nacional de Informática Educativa CONIED'99 at Puertollano, Spain, November 1999. Published on CD.En este artículo se describe TANGOW, Task-based Adaptive learNer Guidance On the Web, un sistema para la enseñanza de cursos accesibles a través de Internet. Los cursos definidos con TANGOW se adaptan a los estudiantes teniendo en cuenta tanto sus características propias (edad, idioma, etc.), como el conjunto de acciones que realizan durante el proceso de aprendizaje. Existe una estructura asociada con cada estudiante en la que se almacena el itinerario seguido por el estudiante en su interacción con el sistema, y que se restaura al inicio de cada sesión. Los cursos gestionados por el sistema se definen en términos de Tareas Docentes y Reglas. Las Reglas especifican la(s) relación(es) entre Tareas que, a su vez, corresponden a unidades conceptuales definidas por el diseñador del curso. Los ejemplos que se utilizan para ilustrar las características del sistema forman parte de un curso sobre educación vial.Este trabajo ha sido realizado dentro del proyecto InterEdu, financiado por la Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT), proyecto número TEL97-0306

Educational resource scheduling based on socio-inspired agents

Revised Selected Papers of 4th International Conference, ICSOFT 2009, Sofia, Bulgaria, July 26-29, 2009.The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20116-5_17Scheduling a set of constrained resources is a difficult task, specially when there is no clear definition of ‘optimal’. When the constraints depend not only on physical or temporal issues but also in human desires or preferences the task gets harder. This is the case of educational resources, for example when a set of students must be distributed into a limited set of laboratories to attend to periodical practical sessions, in this case weekly. The preferences of the students may vary during the process for reasons such as the number of people already in that group. This paper presents a socio–inspired solution implemented as a multiagent system. The agents enroll themselves in the lab sessions based on their preferences and negotiate with other agents, using the resources they already have, to obtain desired groups that were already full.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grants TIN 2007-65989, TIN 2007-64718, and TIN2010-19872