Adaptación dinámica al usuario en un sistema de enseñanza mediante aprendizaje por refuerzo

Uno de los problemas más importantes de los sistemas de educación a distancia es personalizar la enseñanza a cada estudiante, adaptando su política pedagógica dependiendo de las necesidades de aprendizaje que tengan los estudiantes. Los Sistemas de Educación Adaptativos e Inteligentes en Web (del inglés Web-based Adaptive and Intelligent Educational Systems) (SEAIs en Web) son sistemas de educación basados en Internet donde se aplican técnicas de inteligencia artificial con el objetivo de adaptar el contenido del sistema a los estudiantes. Definir políticas pedagógicas efectivas en estos sistemas es uno de los principales problemas de los SEAIs en Web, decidiendo qué, cómo y cuándo mostrar el contenido del curso a los estudiantes. En el trabajo realizado en la presente tesis doctoral se propone definir el problema de soporte adaptativo a la navegación a través del contenido del sistema y de presentación de dicho contenido como un problema de Aprendizaje por Refuerzo. Al aplicar el modelo de aprendizaje por refuerzo en el módulo pedagógico del sistema, éste será capaz de aprender automáticamente la mejor política pedagógica para cada estudiante individualmente, basados únicamente en la experiencia adquirida con otros estudiantes de características de aprendizajes similares, como hace el tutor en las aulas.___________________________________________________ Last years, distance educational systems have been improved opening new perspectives on different ways to teach. The use of Internet as a tool for the educational systems helps the students and avoid the physical barriers in the access to the classrooms and the incompatibilities due to the different students system platforms. One of the most important issues in distance educational systems is to personalize the teaching to each student, adapting its pedagogical policy according to the pedagogical student needs. The application of artificial intelligence techniques to educational systems allows the systems to adapt in an intelligent way to the students, representing implicitly or explicitly the pedagogical policies, abilities and expert knowledge. The Web-based Adaptive and Intelligent Educational Systems (Web-based AIES) use artificial intelligence techniques in order to adapt the content to the students according to their pedagogical needs. One of the most important issues in these systems is to define effective pedagogical strategies for tutoring students according to their needs. The pedagogical strategies define what, how and when to show the system content to the students. In this PhD. Thesis we propose to use a pedagogical knowledge representation based on the Reinforcement Learning (RL) model. Using this model, the system is able to automatically provide adaptive navigation support and presentation support to the students (choosing the best presentation format for the content). The system learns which is the best pedagogical way to teach each student individually based only on acquired experience with other students with similar learning characteristics, like a human tutor does. In this dissertation we show how the definition of the pedagogical policies in the AIESs can be considered as a Reinforcement Learning problem from a theoretical point of view. Next, we show how the system is able to learn to teach from a theoretical point of view, using simulated students. Finally, we show how the system is able to teach in a practical point of view, interacting with real students of our University through Internet

User-centered requirement engineering for accessible chats in m-learning

Chat applications are useful synchronous tools in mobile learning (m-learning) environments. However, these tools have accessibility problems which cannot be avoided by students and teachers with disabilities. This paper focuses on detecting these accessibility problems. Specifically, this paper presents the Requirement Engineering (RE) process carried out to obtain the requirements needed to improve the interaction for people who experience problems with the Flow and Rhythm of the conversation in chats. A methodological approach has been followed and Software Engineering (SE) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) disciplines were combined in order to improve the interaction during the chat.This research was partially supported by the MA2VICMR (S2009/TIC-1542) project. Also, our thanks to all users who took part in the studyPublicad

Accessibility barriers for users of screen readers in the Moodle learning content management system

In recent decades, the use of the Internet has spread rapidly into diverse social spheres including that of education. Currently, most educational centers make use of e-learning environments created through authoring tool applications like learning content management systems (LCMSs). However, most of these applications currently present accessibility barriers that make the creation of accessible e-learning environments difficult for teachers and administrators. In this paper, the accessibility of the Moodle authoring tool, one of the most frequently used LCMSs worldwide, is evaluated. More specifically, the evaluation is carried out from the perspective of two visually impaired users accessing content through screen readers, as well as a heuristic evaluation considering the World Wide Web Consortium's Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines. The evaluation results demonstrate that Moodle presents barriers for screen reader users, limiting their ability to access the tool. One example of accessibility problems for visually impaired users is the frequent inability to publish learning contents without assistance. In light of these results, the paper offers recommendations that can be followed to reduce or eliminate these accessibility barriers.This study has been partially funded by the MA2VICMR (S2009/TIC-1542) research project.Publicad

Accessibility evaluation of Moodle centred in visual impairements

Proceedings of: 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2011), Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, May 6-9, 2011The use of new technologies has been increasing during last years in education. More specifically, the use of e-learning systems provides for students more freedom to learn through Internet when and where they prefer in each moment. However, e-learning tools are not perfect tools. Most of these e-learning tools present accessibility barriers, so not all students are able to use them completely in their studies. The goal of this paper is to evaluate if Moodle e-learning web tool is accessible for visually impaired people using assistive technologies like screen readers. The evaluation has been divided in two main objectives: first, to evaluate Moodle from a user perspective, simulating the interaction of a blind student with the system and using a screen reader; second, to evaluate Moodle from an accessibility expert perspective, analysing if Moodle is in accordance to ATAG and WCAG W3C guidelines.The work presented in this paper has been partially founded by GEMMA (TSI-020302-2010-141) and SAGAS (TSI-020100-2010-184) research projects

Readability of Non-text Images on the World Wide Web (WWW)

The World Wide Web associated the world in a manner that was unrealistic previously and made it a lot more straightforward for users to get data, share and impart. But, irrelevant non-text images on the web pages equally specify poor readability, disrupting the people from the emphasis of the reading. The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the impact of irrelevant or low-quality non-text images on the readability of the webpage. An automatic methodology has been proposed to compute the relevancy of the non-text images. This methodology merges different approaches to extract information from non-text images and read text from websites in order to find relevancy between them. This technique was used to analyze fifty different educational websites to automatically find the relevancy of their non-text images. A user study has been carried out to evaluate the proposed methodology with different types of questions. The results agree with the fact that the relevant non-text images enhance the readability of the web page. This research work will help web designers to improve readability by considering only the relevant content of a web page, without relying on expert judgment.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness under Grant CSO2017-86747-R, in part by the Andalusia Regional Projects under Grant AT17-5509-UMA ``ROSI'' and Grant UMA18-FEDERJA-074 ``ITERA,'' and in part by the European art83 under Contract 8.06/5.58.5900 DIH-HERO ``SUSTAIN.'

Accessible Interface for Multimedia Presentation in Inclusive Education

[Poster] 12th Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE'07), 25-27th June, 2007, Dundee (Scotland)Among the technological solutions to achieve an inclusive education, the educative electronic accessible resources providing content adaptability is an alternative which reduces discrimination. It also favors the inclusion with right equalities which can be used by students regardless of their specific need and use contexts. Following this line of adaptability of contents on the web, a practical case [1] has been launched: an accessible interface of a multimedia resource with caption and audiodescription that offers the user the control over the decision of which sound and/or visual alternatives he wants to be introduced to. This resource has been designed with Universal Design criteria which are found in the Inclusive Design methodological frameworkPublicad

Lightly supervised acquisition of named entities and linguistic patterns for multilingual text mining

Named Entity Recognition and Classification (NERC) is an important component of applications like Opinion Tracking, Information Extraction, or Question Answering. When these applications require to work in several languages, NERC becomes a bottleneck because its development requires language-specific tools and resources like lists of names or annotated corpora. This paper presents a lightly supervised system that acquires lists of names and linguistic patterns from large raw text collections in western languages and starting with only a few seeds per class selected by a human expert. Experiments have been carried out with English and Spanish news collections and with the Spanish Wikipedia. Evaluation of NE classification on standard datasets shows that NE lists achieve high precision and reveals that contextual patterns increase recall significantly. Therefore, it would be helpful for applications where annotated NERC data are not available such as those that have to deal with several western languages or information from different domains.This researchwork has been supported by the Regional Government of Madrid under the Research Network MA2VICMR (S2009/TIC-1542), by the Spanish Ministry of Education under the project MULTIMEDICA (TIN2010-20644-C03-01) and by the Spanish Center for Industry Technological Development (CDTI, Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade), through the BUSCAMEDIA Project (CEN-20091026)

Automated Readability Assessment for Spanish e-Government Information

This paper automatically evaluates the readability of Spanish e-government websites. Specifically, the websites collected explain e-government administrative procedures. The evaluation is carried out through the analysis of different linguistic characteristics that are presumably associated with a better understanding of these resources. To this end, texts from websites outside the government websites have been collected. These texts clarify the procedures published on the Spanish Government"s websites. These websites constitute the part of the corpus considered as the set of easy documents. The rest of the corpus has been completed with counterpart documents from government websites. The text of the documents has been processed, and the difficulty is evaluated through different classic readability metrics. At a later stage, automatic learning methods are used to apply algorithms to predict the difficulty of the text. The results of the study show that government web pages show high values for comprehension difficulty. This work proposes a new Spanish-language corpus of official e-government websites. In addition, a large number of combined linguistic attributes are applied, which improve the identification of the level of comprehensibility of a text with respect to classic metrics.Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, (CSO2017-86747-R)

Sustainable technologies for older adults

: The exponential evolution of technology and the growth of the elderly population are two phenomena that will inevitably interact with increasing frequency in the future. This paper analyses scientific literature as a means of furthering progress in sustainable technology for senior living. We carried out a bibliometric analysis of papers published in this area and compiled by the Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus, examining the main participants and advances in the field from 2000 to the first quarter of 2021. The study describes some interesting research projects addressing three different aspects of older adults’ daily lives—health, daily activities and wellbeing—and policies to promote healthy aging and improve the sustainability of the healthcare system. It also looks at lines of research into transversal characteristics of technology. Our analysis showed that publications mentioning sustainability technologies for older adults have been growing progressively since the 2000s, but that the big increase in the number of research works in this area took place during the period 2016–2021. These more recent works show a tendency to study those factors that improve healthy aging, ensure the social inclusion of the elderly through technology and prolong the time in which they can live independent lives thanks to smart environments. Current research gaps in the literature are also discussed.: This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, (CSO2017-86747-R) and supported in part by the FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades-Agencia Estatal de Investigación, through the Smartlet and H2O Learn Projects under Grants TIN2017-85179-C3-1-R and PID2020-112584RB-C31, and in part by the Madrid Regional Government through the e-Madrid-CM Project under Grant S2018/TCS-4307