Antonio Sarasa Cabezuelo

Innovating in the Engineering Processes: Engineering as a Means of Innovation

Innovation and engineering are very close concepts. Innovation is one of the key competences of the engineers in the way they use their own creativity and knowledge base to face the problems they have to resolve for humanity’s improvement and social evolution. In this special section, we have selected four papers from three research events (CINAIC 2013, TEEM 2013, and ISELEAR 2013) that empower the innovation and research cycles in engineering from different perspectives.

A Teaching Application to Improve Access and Management of Web-Based Academic Materials

The seminars are a learning mechanism that serve to complement regular education with more specialized content. Different learning materials are generated from the seminars activity, such as documentation, presentations, videos, exercises… These materials can also be used for teaching purposes in other contexts. The management and distribution of these materials is normally done by hand or stored in a digital repository. The problem with these tools is that they facilitate storage management but are not focused to support their formative application. This article describes the experience of creating a web tool that allows to take profit of the materials generated in a seminar called Zaragoza Linguistics for later teaching use. The functionality has been implemented using web scraping techniques and the YouTube web services API.

Learning Resources Based on Analysis of Digital Newspaper Data

Digital newspapers are a source of information with very particular characteristics such as: they collect heterogeneous information on a wide variety of subjects, they can be considered truthful sources of information, generally their html pages have a regular structure, they are maintained permanently archived, they are quickly indexed by the main search engines, and the format of their URLs is regular, … This article describes a work developed in the context of a final degree project from the School of Computer Science at the Complutense University of Madrid. The objective of the work was to analyze the problems related to recover the information of an online newspaper, analyze which tools can be used to extract information, and how the retrieved information can be exploited in order to generate value-added services. To illustrate the results of this work, it has developed a prototype application in Python.

A web tool for assessment of the quality of digital educational materials

Information and materials on practically any topic can be currently found on the Internet. However, the advances to classify and measure the quality of materials have been minimal and scattered. Anyone can create materials and publish them, but no one ensures or guarantees that those materials will be accessible or their contents will be suitable for study. This means that, even though a huge amount of materials are available, it is difficult to retrieve those that have a minimum level of quality. This general problem worsens in educational domains, such as the university, where teachers continuously create and update digital educational materials with no guidance as to the minimum requirements for their materials not to pose technical problems - such as portability and durability -, teaching problems - such as the consistency between goals and recipients, on the one hand, and suitable design and format for study, on the other - and accessibility problem - such as ensuring the perceptibility of audiovisual and textual materials. In this context, an AENOR working group has developed a proposal of a Spanish quality standard for educational materials (UNE 71632). On the basis of this standard, a web tool has been developed to implement the standard and facilitate the assessment of the quality of digital educational materials. This paper presents the tool developed and its main features.

A System to Manage Non-Formal Higher Education Activities

In addition to formal courses, higher education usually involves other non-formal activities, such as seminars, workshops, and conferences. Many times, there is a lack of institutional support for managing these activities, so the organizers are responsible for such management, which implies a significant extra effort. In this paper, we describe a system developed in the Computer Science School at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, whose goal is to facilitate the management and organization of these activities in order to free the organizers from some of these tasks. Furthermore, this paper describes a case study concerning how the system was used at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, in the context of the Zaragoza Linguistics series of seminars and cultural diffusion initiatives.