Francisco José García Peñalvo

An association rule mining method for estimating the impact of project management policies on software quality, development time and effort

Accurate and early estimations are essential for effective decision making in software project management. Nowadays, classical estimation models are being replaced by data mining models due to their application simplicity and the rapid production of profitable results. In this work, a method for mining association rules that relate project attributes is proposed. It deals with the problem of discretizing continuous data in order to generate a manageable number of high confident association rules. The method was validated by applying it to data from a Software Project Simulator. The association model obtained allows us to estimate the influence of certain management policy factors on various software project attributes simultaneously.

Adapting LMS Architecture to the SOA: An Architectural Approach

Service oriented approaches (SOA) are currently used to develop new software-as-a-service applications, but they can also be used in the reengineering of existing legacy systems, such as Learning Management Systems (LMS). The introduction of a SOA to reengineer current LMS can provide LMS with the ability to deliver internal functions as services as well as the ability to integrate external applications as services. This paper presents an architectural approach to adapt the Moodle LMS to the SOA and some important issues involved in the adaptation are analyzed. Taking into account interoperability specifications, all SOA to LMS adaptation drawbacks are solved by the application of the new architecture.

Interoperability for LMS: the missing piece to become the common place for e-learning innovation

This paper speculates about the future of LMSs considering the upcoming new learning applications and technologies, and the different attitudes of learners and teachers, given their technological background described using the digital natives and immigrants metaphor. Interoperability is not just a nice feature to have, but a must have feature for LMS if these systems are going to be the common place where the ICT empowered learning innovation happens. After analysing some standards and initiatives related to interoperability on LMS, the authors present an overview of the architecture for interoperability they propose. This architecture is being implemented for the well known open source LMS Moodle.

Building knowledge discovery-driven models for decision support in project management

Accurate estimations of software size in the early stages of a software project are critical in software project management because they lead to a good planning and reduce project costs. In this work, the relation between early software size measures as the function points and measures of the final product as the lines of code has been studied. A process to refine association rules, based on the generation of unexpected patterns, is proposed. The goal is to generate strong association rules between attributes that can be obtained early in the project and the final software size.

Teachers' attitude regarding the use of ICT. A factor reliability and validity study

Current research examines the need for design and validation of a unifactorial scale to measure attitudes of university teachers with regard to ICT. The main goal of this study is to achieve a simple scale, composed of a single factor contributing a clearly reliable measure with acceptable content and factorial validity. A case study is presented, which has been developed with the teaching staff of the University of Salamanca (Spain). In this case study, an expert content validation was done at a first stage. After that, an attitude scale regarding the usage of ICT in teaching was applied with a representative sample of teachers (N=2329; n=161). An individual analysis of the items was made with the obtained results and then a Cronbachs alpha based reliability test was carried out to show the internal consistency of the survey. Finally, an exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was applied to prove its structural soundness and unifactoriality. The main conclusion of this paper is to offer to the scientific community a tool with adequate psychometric properties that gives added pedagogical value to the introduction of ICT in higher education teaching.

SOA Initiatives for eLearning: A Moodle Case

Mobile learning applications introduce a new degree of ubiquitousness in the learning process. There is a new generation of ICT-powered mobile learning experiences that exist in isolated contexts: experiences limited to small learning communities. These rising mobile learning experiences appear while web-based learning, specially Learning Management Systems (LMS), are consolidated and widely adopted by learning institutions, teachers and learners. The innovation techniques breeding in the experimental world of mobile learning need to be translated into the mainstream echosystems. Mobile learning is not intended to replace e-learning or web based learning, but to extend it. So, mobile learning applications need to be integrated somehow in the web-based LMS. To do so is needed to address interoperability issues on both ends: the LMS and the mobile application. Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture offer a standarized and effective way to achieve interoperability between systems. This paper presents an architecture that allows a two-way interoperability between LMS and Mobile Applications: access LMS contents from the mobile device, and to be able to embed part of the mobile applications inside the LMS framework. This architecture incorporates elements from famous interoperability standards (IMS LTI and OKI) and has been validated with two projects related to the Open Source LMS Moodle.

Information systems, e-learning, and knowledge management research

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 4th World Summit on the Knowledge Society, WSKS 2011, held in Mykonos, Greece, in September 2011. The 90 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 198 submissions. The papers address issues such as information technology, e-learning, e-business, cultural heritage, e-government.

Qualified Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices for GREDOS

The aim of this article is to present the work carried out to create GREDOS, the Institutional Repository of the University of Salamanca. Besides introducing GREDOS and explaining how the project was developed, we also present our best practices manual in the use of Qualified Dublin Core Metadata (QDCM). The guidelines followed in the use of metadata, standardization, work methodology, and the digitalization parameters employed are described. Some practical examples of descriptions of different digital resources of varied typology are provided. We conclude by showing the final outcome of the project.

Interoperability for LMS: The Missing Piece to Become the Common Place for Elearning Innovation

This paper speculates about the future of LMSs considering the upcoming new learning applications and technologies, and the different attitudes of learners and teachers, given their technological background described using the digital natives and immigrants metaphor. Interoperability is not just a nice to have feature, but a must have features for LMS if these systems are going to be the common place where the ICT empowered learning innovation happens. After analyzing some standards and initiatives related to interoperability on LMS, the authors present an overview of the architecture for interoperability they propose. This architecture is being implemented for the well known Open Source LMS Moodle.

Adaptive Educational Hypermedia proposal based on Learning Styles and quality evaluation

This is a proposal of how to determine quality attributes in the Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems based on Learning Styles for a later design of a quality evaluation methodology of these systems. Some specific learning styles and their relationships with the outlined instructional strategies are examined, in order to find in a further work a way of how to determine the quality attributes and standards for the elaboration of the quality evaluation methodology for this systems.