A study on assessment results in a large scale Flipped Teaching Experience

[EN] During the last academic year, Universitat Politècnica de Valencia (UPV) developed a large scale experience in flipped teaching (FT), with 64 different courses and 3083 students (2512 unique). Teachers could decide to participate in the experience on their own, and in quite a number of courses we have groups with FT and groups without it. Assessment of the students was done using classical systems (mostly written exams). Evaluation of the experience was done through several ways: First we did a qualitative survey to teachers and students, and then we carried out an analytical study about the results of the assessments, comparing between years, between FT and classical courses and also internally in the courses with FT and classical groups. Results of this analysis show that students like the FT system and that they got statistically significant better results in the classical assessments, with at least a 5% gain. Also we have no correlation results with the perceived teacher quality and the student group size. So this study allows to verify the capabilities of FT approach in higher educational institutions.http://ocs.editorial.upv.es/index.php/HEAD/HEAD18Turró, C.; Morales, JC.; Busquets-Mataix, J. (2018). A study on assessment results in a large scale Flipped Teaching Experience. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1039-1048. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD18.2018.8141OCS1039104

Developing a MOOC Initiative: lessons learnt from The Universitat Politecnica de Valencia experience

[EN] Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV) was the European institution with more MOOC course runs done by December 2016. This paper describes and analyses the decision-making process, and rationale of the development of this low budget real MOOC institutional initiative carried out by a traditional higher educational medium sized institution. This analysis is done using an Evaluative Research (ER) method based on an iterative approach of 6 cycles of formative evaluation. It has been a multiple stage process that includes many aspects. In this paper, we will analyze two of them: the creation, organization and management of a fast and cheap MOOC production process, including the several tools, plans, and procedures that have enabled UPV to create courses fast and with a low-cost; and the technical evolution of the initiative, with the different platforms that have been used. As a consequence of this process, UPV has its own platform (upvx.es) based on openedX and is a member of edx.org, with 50 courses, 177 editions, and more than 632.000 enrollments. The completion rate is 8.69%, and post-course surveys reveal a high level of satisfaction from students. The paper will finish addressing the challenges of making this an entirely self-sustainable initiative and reflecting about what is required for evaluating this experience globally.Despujol Zabala, I.; Castañeda Quintero, L.; Turró Ribalta, C. (2018). Developing a MOOC Initiative: lessons learnt from The Universitat Politecnica de Valencia experience. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education. 19(1):215-233. doi:10.17718/tojde.38280521523319

Using a Hybrid Recommending System for Learning Videos in Flipped Classrooms and MOOCs

[EN] New challenges in education require new ways of education. Higher education has adapted to these new challenges by means of offering new types of training like massive online open courses and by updating their teaching methodology using novel approaches as flipped classrooms. These types of training have enabled universities to better adapt to the challenges posed by the pandemic. In addition, high quality learning objects are necessary for these new forms of education to be successful, with learning videos being the most common learning objects to provide theoretical concepts. This paper describes a new approach of a previously presented hybrid learning recommender system based on content-based techniques, which was capable of recommend useful videos to learners and lecturers from a learning video repository. In this new approach, the content-based techniques are also combined with a collaborative filtering module, which increases the probability of recommending relevant videos. This hybrid technique has been successfully applied to a real scenario in the central video repository of the Universitat Politècnica de València.This research was partially supported by MINECO/FEDER RTI2018-095390-B-C31 and TIN2017-89156-R projects of the Spanish government, and PROMETEO/2018/002 project of Generalitat Valenciana.Jordán, J.; Valero Cubas, S.; Turró, C.; Botti, V. (2021). Using a Hybrid Recommending System for Learning Videos in Flipped Classrooms and MOOCs. Electronics. 10(11):1-19. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10111226S119101

Grabación automatizada de clases magistrales: el proyecto Videoapuntes de la UPV

On the second half of the academic year 2011-2012, the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) has developed a pilot test on automated lecture recording, called “Videoapuntes”, in which high quality recordings of the lectures have been made for several courses. Then students are able to view those recordings, including video, audio and the teacher’s computer screen through the virtual campus platform using a web interface. These recordings have been made following the guidelines of the Opencast consortium, of which UPV is member. Results of this pilot have been very positive both in teachers and students opinion, so we have developed a second phase in which we have recorded more than 800 hours on the first half of the 2012-2013 academic year and now we are currently recording around 1500 hours per period. In this paper we will present the system and the results obtained during the period of the Videoapuntes project.Durante el segundo cuatrimestre del curso 2011-2012, la Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) ha desarrollado un programa piloto de grabación automatizada de clases magistrales, denominado “Videoapuntes”, en el que los alumnos de las asignaturas del piloto tienen acceso a una grabación en alta calidad de los contenidos de audio, vídeo y ordenador de las clases magistrales que se han realizado en dicha asignatura a través de la plataforma del campus virtual. Esta grabación se ha realizado utilizando la tecnología desarrollada por el consorcio internacional Opencast, del cual la UPV es miembro activo. Los resultados del piloto fuero muy positivos tanto por parte de los profesores como de los alumnos, motivo por el que se ha desarrollado una segunda fase piloto con 25 aulas docentes y en la que se han grabado más de 800 horas lectivas en el primer cuatrimestre del curso 2012-2013, con una continuación en los siguientes cuatrimestres a un ritmo de aproximadamente 1.500 horas grabadas por cuatrimestre. En esta contribución presentaremos tanto las características del sistema como los resultados obtenidos en los mismos durante el desarrollo del proyecto

Efficient Generation of High-Quality Multilingual Subtitles for Video Lecture Repositories

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24258-3_44Video lectures are a valuable educational tool in higher education to support or replace face-to-face lectures in active learning strategies. In 2007 the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) implemented its video lecture capture system, resulting in a high quality educational video repository, called poliMedia, with more than 10.000 mini lectures created by 1.373 lecturers. Also, in the framework of the European project transLectures, UPV has automatically generated transcriptions and translations in Spanish, Catalan and English for all videos included in the poliMedia video repository. transLectures’s objective responds to the widely-recognised need for subtitles to be provided with video lectures, as an essential service for non-native speakers and hearing impaired persons, and to allow advanced repository functionalities. Although high-quality automatic transcriptions and translations were generated in transLectures, they were not error-free. For this reason, lecturers need to manually review video subtitles to guarantee the absence of errors. The aim of this study is to evaluate the efficiency of the manual review process from automatic subtitles in comparison with the conventional generation of video subtitles from scratch. The reported results clearly indicate the convenience of providing automatic subtitles as a first step in the generation of video subtitles and the significant savings in time of up to almost 75 % involved in reviewing subtitles.The research leading to these results has received funding fromthe European Union FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement no 287755 (transLectures) and ICT PSP/2007-2013 under grant agreement no 621030 (EMMA), and the Spanish MINECO Active2Trans (TIN2012-31723) research project.Valor Miró, JD.; Silvestre Cerdà, JA.; Civera Saiz, J.; Turró Ribalta, C.; Juan Císcar, A. (2015). Efficient Generation of High-Quality Multilingual Subtitles for Video Lecture Repositories. En Design for Teaching and Learning in a Networked World. Springer Verlag (Germany). 485-490. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24258-3_44S485490del-Agua, M.A., Giménez, A., Serrano, N., Andrés-Ferrer, J., Civera, J., Sanchis, A., Juan, A.: The translectures-UPV toolkit. In: Navarro Mesa, J.L., Ortega, A., Teixeira, A., Hernández Pérez, E., Quintana Morales, P., Ravelo García, A., Guerra Moreno, I., Toledano, D.T. (eds.) IberSPEECH 2014. LNCS, vol. 8854, pp. 269–278. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)Glass, J., et al.: Recent progress in the MIT spoken lecture processing project. In: Proceedings of Interspeech 2007, vol. 3, pp. 2553–2556 (2007)Koehn, P., et al.: Moses: open source toolkit for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of ACL, pp. 177–180 (2007)Munteanu, C., et al.: Improving ASR for lectures through transformation-based rules learned from minimal data. In: Proceedings of ACL-AFNLP, pp. 764–772 (2009)poliMedia: polimedia platform (2007). http://media.upv.es/Ross, T., Bell, P.: No significant difference only on the surface. Int. J. Instr. Technol. Distance Learn. 4(7), 3–13 (2007)Silvestre, J.A. et al.: Translectures. In: Proceedings of IberSPEECH 2012 (2012)Soong, S.K.A., Chan, L.K., Cheers, C., Hu, C.: Impact of video recorded lectures among students. In: Who’s Learning, pp. 789–793 (2006)Valor Miró, J.D., Pérez González de Martos, A., Civera, J., Juan, A.: Integrating a state-of-the-art ASR system into the opencast matterhorn platform. In: Torre Toledano, D., Ortega Giménez, A., Teixeira, A., González Rodríguez, J., Hernández Gómez, L., San Segundo Hernández, R., Ramos Castro, D. (eds.) IberSPEECH 2012. CCIS, vol. 328, pp. 237–246. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)Wald, M.: Creating accessible educational multimedia through editing automatic speech recognition captioning in real time. Inter. Technol. Smart Educ. 3(2), 131–141 (2006

WLAN IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n Indoor Coverage and Interference Performance Study

An adequate wireless network plan is needed to replace the traditional wired LANs. A full coverage WLAN offers the flexibility to relocate people and equipment or to reconfigure and add more wireless devices to the network. Usually, an IEEE 802.11 variant is chosen based on their bandwidth and their coverage area. However, sometimes there are special cases where the best technology is not the newest one. In addition, suitable positioning of access points (AP) is crucial to determine the efficiency of the network. E.g. in the case where devices are going to transmit at a maximum of 1 Mbps, any choice is acceptable, but when it is required higher performance, other factors must be considered. In this paper, we compare IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n indoor environments to know what technology is better. This comparison will be taken in terms of RSSI, coverage area, and measuring the interferences between channels. These key factors must be optimum to have high performance in the WLAN. This study will help the researchers to choose the best technology depending of their deploying case, and we will see study the best variant for indoors.Sendra, S.; García Pineda, M.; Turró Ribalta, C.; Lloret, J. (2011). WLAN IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n Indoor Coverage and Interference Performance Study. International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services. 4(1):209-222. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/47035S2092224

Automated Lecture Recording: Videoapuntes Project at UPV

[EN] On the second half of the academic year 2011-2012, the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) has developed a pilot test on automated lecture recording, called ¿Videoapuntes¿, in which high quality recordings of the lectures have been made for several courses. Then students are able to view those recordings, including video, audio and the teacher¿s computer screen through the virtual campus platform using a web interface. These recordings have been made following the guidelines of the Opencast consortium, of which UPV is member. Results of this pilot have been very positive both in teachers and students opinion, so we have developed a second phase in which we have recorded more than 800 hours on the first half of the 2012-2013 academic year and now we are currently recording around 1500 hours per period. In this paper we will present the system and the results obtained during the period of the Videoapuntes project.[ES] Durante el segundo cuatrimestre del curso 2011-2012, la Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) ha desarrollado un programa piloto de grabación automatizada de clases magistrales, denominado Videoapuntes , en el que los alumnos de las asignaturas del piloto tienen acceso a una grabación en alta calidad de los contenidos de audio, vídeo y ordenador de las clases magistrales que se han realizado en dicha asignatura a través de la plataforma del campus virtual. Esta grabación se ha realizado utilizando la tecnología desarrollada por el consorcio internacional Opencast, del cual la UPV es miembro activo. Los resultados del piloto fuero muy positivos tanto por parte de los profesores como de los alumnos, motivo por el que se ha desarrollado una segunda fase piloto con 25 aulas docentes y en la que se han grabado más de 800 horas lectivas en el primer cuatrimestre del curso 2012-2013, con una continuación en los siguientes cuatrimestres a un ritmo de aproximadamente 1.500 horas grabadas por cuatrimestre. En esta contribución presentaremos tanto las características del sistema como los resultados obtenidos en los mismos durante el desarrollo del proyecto.Turró Ribalta, C.; Despujol Zabala, I.; Busquets Mataix, JL. (2014). Grabación automatizada de clases magistrales: el proyecto Videoapuntes de la UPV. Revista de Educación a Distancia-Docencia Universitaria en la Sociedad del Conocimiento.RED-DUSC. 13(40):29-35. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/112947S2935134

Users macro and micro-mobility study using WLANs in a University Campus

The author(s) of a manuscript agree that, if the manuscript is accepted for publication in IARIA journals, the published article will be copyrighted using a Creative Commons "Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike" license.Wireless Local Area Networks are important and necessary in university campuses and large enterprise areas. Such networks allow us to have data connection anywhere without wires and many other benefits such as to obtain the location of the users. Moreover, they can be used to track the users. Tracking the user’s mobility we can know which places are most visited, if people have to go to places that are far from their office, detect the best location for emergency points, etc. Moreover, we can study the mobility pattern of several users. According to this pattern, the network can use reconfiguration systems to reallocate resources and improve its connectivity. This paper shows us the case study of a university campus of two square kilometers and how we have taken advantage of the information gathered from the wireless network. Two studies (macro and micro mobility) have been done in order to make this survey. This approach can be used by the enterprises to optimize the sites to place their resources (network printers, servers, meeting rooms, etc.). Furthermore, the network’s administrators can use these parameters to improve the network’s behavior by providing a better connection, better roaming, etc.García Pineda, M.; Sendra, S.; Turró Ribalta, C.; Lloret, J. (2011). Users macro and micro-mobility study using WLANs in a University Campus. International Journal On Advances in Internet Technology. 4(1):37-46. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/51075S37464

Generación eficiente de transcripciones y traducciones automáticas en poliMedia

[EN] Usage of educational videos in higher education has raised quickly for different educational applications, which leads to platforms and services such as poliMedia, of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), which enables the creation, publication and dissemination of this educational multimedia content. Through various research projects, and specifically the European project transLectures, UPV implemented a system that automatically generates subtitles in various languages for all poliMedia videos. Creation of these subtitles is made by an automatic speech recognition and machine translation system that provides high accuracy in both recognition and translation to the main European languages. Transcripts and translations are not only used to improve accessibility, but also allow search and retrieval of video contents within the video portal. So a user can locate the video, and the time within it, where a certain word is said for later viewing. In this article we also extend previous work in the assessment of the review process, including transcription of French and Spanish to Catalan translation.[ES] El uso de vídeos docentes en el mundo universitario se ha extendido e implantado rápidamente en diferentes aplicaciones docentes, lo que da pie a plataformas y servicios como poliMedia, de la Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), que permite la creación, publicación y difusión de este contenido multimedia docente.Por medio de diversos proyectos de investigación, y específicamente el proyecto europeo transLectures, la UPV implementó un sistema que genera automáticamente subtítulos en diversos idiomas para todos los vídeos de poliMedia. Esta generación de subtítulos está basada en sistemas de reconocimiento automático del habla y de traducción automática, que proporcionan una elevada precisión en dicho reconocimiento y traducción a los principales idiomas europeos.Las transcripciones y traducciones generadas no se utilizan únicamente para mejorar la accesibilidad, sino que también permiten la búsqueda y localización de los contenidos de vídeo dentro del portal. Así se puede localizar el vídeo, y el instante dentro de él, donde se dijo una determinada palabra.En este artículo también ampliamos los trabajos previos sobre la evaluación del proceso de revisión, incluyendo la transcripción de francés y la traducción de español a catalán.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no 287755Valor Miró, J.; Turró Ribalta, C.; Civera Saiz, J.; Juan Císcar, A. (2016). Generación eficiente de transcripciones y traducciones automáticas en poliMedia. En In-Red 2016. II Congreso nacional de innovación educativa y docencia en red. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/INRED2016.2016.4276OC

transLectures: Transcription and Translation of Video Lectures

[EN] transLectures is a FP7 project aimed at developing innovative, cost-effective solutions to produce accurate transcriptions and translations in large repositories of video lectures. This paper describes user requirements, first integration steps and evaluation plans at transLectures case studies, VideoLectures.NET and poliMedia.TransLectures is a FP7 project aimed at developing innovative, cost-effective solutions to produce accurate transcriptions and translations in large repositories of video lectures.Turró Ribalta, C.; Juan, A.; Civera Saiz, J.; Orlic, D.; Jermol, M. (2012). transLectures: Transcription and Translation of Video Lectures. En Proceedings of Cambridge 2012: Innovation and Impact - Openly Collaborating to Enhance Education. The Open University. 543-546. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/5416654354