José Miguel Mota

Augmented reality mobile app development for all

Abstract Lack of programming skills is a barrier to the engagement of teachers in the development and customisation of their own applications. Visual Environment for Designing Interactive Learning Scenarios (VEDILS), a visual tool for designing, customising and deploying learning technologies, provides teachers with a development environment with a low entry threshold. Current mobile devices are equipped with sensors and have sufficient processing power to use augmented reality technologies. Despite the heavy use of mobile devices in students’ lives, the use of augmented reality mobile applications as learning tools is not widespread among teachers. The current work presents a framework comprising the development tool and a method for designing and deploying learning activities. It focuses on the augmented reality components of the authoring tools, which allow users to create their own mobile augmented reality learning apps. It also present the results of the evaluation of the framework with 47 third-level educators, and two case studies of classroom implementations of mobile augmented reality apps developed by these educators. The results illustrate the suitability of the framework and authoring tool for supporting users without programming skills in developing their own apps.

Learning Technologies and Semantic Integration of Learning Resources

Nowadays, virtual learning environments are developed as digital ecosystems based on existing resources, applications, and web services. Even if they are not hosted in a centralized course management system, they are usually highly coupled. In this paper, we show how semantic technologies can help decoupling them. We build an e-learning web ecosystem enriched with an educational information according to an educational information model and a domain-specific model, so we provide teachers and students with a common user interface. We implemented our proposal in the ASCETA project, integrating well-known open-source systems, such as wikis, blogs, microblogging services, content management systems, and task management systems.

Open discovery space: a socially-powered and multilingual open learning infrastructure to boost the adoption of elearning resources

OpenDiscoverySpace (ODS) is a 3-year European FP7 project comprising 51 partners from 23 European countries. ODS project aspires to boost demand for OERs and to introduce innovative teaching and learning practices in schools through the effective use of these resources. The project also intends to promote the creation of communities between European schools. In order to concentrate both, OERs and school communities, it has been built a large, multilingual community and a web portal around the diverse OERs that are currently dispersed in well-known educational repositories in Europe. The portal is a community-oriented social platform where students, teachers and parents will be able to discover, acquire, share, discuss, reuse and revise OERs.

Learning Analytics in Mobile Applications Based on Multimodal Interaction

One of the most valuable skills for teachers is the ability to produce their own digital solutions, translating teaching concepts into end-user computer systems. This often requires the involvement of computing specialists. As a result, the development of educational programming environments remains a challenge. Learning experiences based multimodal interaction applications (gesture interaction, voice recognition or artificial vision) are becoming commonplace in education because they motivate and involve students. This chapter analyses the state-of-the-art in LA techniques and user-friendly authoring tools. It presents a tool to support the creation of multimodal interactive applications equipped with non-intrusive monitoring and analytics capabilities. This tool enables teachers with no programming skills to create interactive LA-enriched learning scenarios. To this end, several components that manage LA activities are included in the tool, they range from automatically capturing users’ interaction with mobile applications, to querying data and retrieving metrics, to visualising tables and charts.