Juan Alberto Muñoz-Cristóbal

GLUE!-PS: a multi-language architecture and data model to deploy TEL designs to multiple learning environments

The complexity of orchestrating TEL scenarios prompts for a careful learning design by practitioners. Currently, teachers can use variety of tools and languages to express their designs, but they are unlikely to be supported in deploying such designs in the learning environment of their choice. This paper describes a multi-tier architecture and data model to support the deployment of learning designs, expressed in multiple languages, to different learning platforms. The proposal strives to be sustainable in authentic scenarios by minimising both software development costs and changes to current installations. The architecture and data model are theoretically validated through the transformation of a well-known learning scenario from several design languages to different learning platforms, preserving the designs essential characteristics.

Supporting Teacher Orchestration in Ubiquitous Learning Environments: A Study in Primary Education

During the last decades, educational contexts have transformed into complex technological and social ecologies, with mobile devices expanding the scope of education beyond the traditional classroom, creating so-called Ubiquitous Learning Environments (ULEs). However, these new technological opportunities entail an additional burden for teachers, who need to manage and coordinate the resources involved in such complex educational scenarios in a process known as “orchestration”. This paper presents the evaluation of the orchestration support provided by GLUEPS-AR, a system aimed to help teachers in the coordination of across-spaces learning situations carried out in ULEs. The evaluation, following an interpretive research perspective, relied on a study where a pre-service teacher designed and enacted an authentic across-spaces learning situation in a primary school. The situation, which illustrates the orchestration challenges of ULEs, was aimed at fostering orienteering skills. It spanned five sessions taking place in the classroom, in the schools playground and at a nearby park, using multiple technologies and devices. The evaluation showed that GLUEPS-AR helped the teacher in the multiple aspects of orchestration, including implementation of his pedagogical ideas, adaptation in runtime, and sharing of orchestration load with students. Teacher awareness during outdoor activities was the main aspect to improve upon.

Supporting orchestration of CSCL scenarios in web-based Distributed Learning Environments

The orchestration of technology-enhanced learning situations (especially collaborative ones), that involve both Virtual Learning Environments and Web 2.0 tools (what some authors call Distributed Learning Environments, or DLEs) is often complex and burdensome, given the heterogeneous array of resources involved. In this paper we explore how GLUE!-PS (a system for the deployment and run-time management of learning designs across DLEs) supports orchestration, through its teacher usage in three authentic university courses and one teacher workshop. Our mixed methods evaluation reveals that GLUE!-PS supports multiple aspects of orchestration, especially the efficient implementation of teacher learning designs, the ability for useful and intuitive adaptations in run-time, and its adequacy to pragmatic restrictions that teachers face in authentic settings. Aside from the implications for the evaluated system itself, this article discusses the need for evaluations that address orchestrations multiple facets, and provides a practical example of such multi-faceted evaluation of educational systems, in order to assess their potential for adoption and sustainability in authentic settings.

Integrating orchestration of ubiquitous and pervasive learning environments

Ubiquitous and pervasive computing devices, such as interactive tabletops, whiteboards, tablets and phones, have the potential to enhance the management and awareness of learning activities in important ways. They provide students with natural ways to interact with collaborators, and can help teachers create and manage learning tasks that can be carried out both in the classroom and at a distance. But how can these emerging technologies be successfully integrated into current teaching practice? This paper proposes an approach to integrate, from the technological perspective, collaborative learning activities using these kinds of devices. Our approach is based on the concept of orchestration, which tackles the critical task for teachers to coordinate students learning activities within the constraints of authentic educational settings. Our studies within authentic learning settings enabled us to identify three main elements that are important for ubiquitous and pervasive learning settings. These are i) regulation mechanisms, ii) interconnection with existing web-based learning environments, and iii) awareness tools.

From Low-Scale to Collaborative, Gamified and Massive-Scale Courses: Redesigning a MOOC

Despite the success of MOOCs to promote open leaning, they are usually criticized for their high drop-out rates and behaviorist pedagogical approach. Some active learning strategies, such as collaboration and gamification, have shown their potential to overcome some of these problems at low scale. However, the design and implementation of such strategies in MOOCs is still a challenge, which is being studied by several researchers, who tend to focus specially on the enactment of MOOCs. Therefore, there is a need for research studies exploring the design processes of MOOCs including active strategies. In this paper, we describe a co-redesign process in which an economic translation course conceived as a MOOC but finally implemented in Moodle for blended learning, was redesigned to include collaboration and gamification to implement it in Canvas Network (a MOOC platform). During the redesign process we found severe difficulties related to the scale, which were mainly caused by the initial implementation in a typical LMS.

Monitoring for awareness and reflection in ubiquitous learning environments

ABSTRACT Despite the educational affordances that ubiquitous learning has shown, it is still hampered by several orchestration difficulties. One of these difficulties is that teachers lose awareness of what the students perform across the multiple technologies and spaces involved. Monitoring can help in such awareness, and it has been highly explored in face-to-face and blended learning. Nevertheless, in ubiquitous learning environments, monitoring has been usually limited to activities taking place in a specific type of space (e.g., outdoors). In this article, we propose a monitoring system for ubiquitous learning, which was evaluated in three authentic studies, supporting the participants in the affordable monitoring of learning situations involving web, augmented-physical, and 3D virtual world spaces. The work carried out also helped identify a set of guidelines, which are expected to be useful for researchers and technology developers aiming to provide participants’ support in ubiquitous learning environments.

Learning Buckets: Helping Teachers Introduce Flexibility in the Management of Learning Artifacts Across Spaces

Technology offers rich opportunities for learning across different physical and virtual spaces. However, most of current across-spaces proposals are either highly teacher-centered, inflexible in the students’ self-management of learning artifacts during the enactment, or allow the teacher little/no control of such students’ management of artifacts. Moreover, these proposals tend to be disconnected from the practices and tools that are usual in the classroom. How can we achieve a middle ground between keeping the teacher in control of across-spaces situations and, at the same time, providing students with a degree of flexibility to manage learning artifacts? Aiming to address such a challenge we propose the notion of learning bucket, and the Bucket-Server, a system implementing such a notion. A learning bucket is a container of learning artifacts which are generated and/or accessed across-spaces by the students during the enactment, according to constraints configured by teachers at design time. The responsive evaluation conducted, based on a feature analysis and a pilot study with experts, suggests that learning buckets can help evolve from teacher- to student-centered approaches, while maintaining the teacher in control of students’ actions. The evaluation also indicates that the Bucket-Server surpasses the support provided by alternative proposals to across-spaces learning.

Automatic Group Formation in a MOOC Based on Students’ Activity Criteria

Although there is significant evidence regarding benefits of small group collaboration in small-scale contexts, several challenges have been detected about the use of collaborative learning in MOOCs. Group formation, which is a crucial activity in order to achieve effective collaboration, is scarcely covered in MOOC platforms, which do not allow the formation of teams using criteria defined by the instructors. This paper presents an exploratory study conducted in a seven-week MOOC, comparing our group formation proposal, based on students’ activity criteria, to a baseline grouping function provided by the platform. We analyse the impact of each grouping approach over group performance, group activity, and student satisfaction. The results show initial evidence about the advantages of using the criteria-based group formation approach regarding student satisfaction and group interactions.

How Gamification Is Being Implemented in MOOCs? A Systematic Literature Review

Although MOOCs are being established as a very popular technology to support learning, they are often criticized for their lack of support to active pedagogies and the high drop-out rates. One approach to face this problem is gamification, due to the promising benefits already shown at small-scale environments. Attending to the current and growing use of game elements in MOOCs, this paper presents a systematic literature review of the usage of gamification in MOOCs, aimed at analyzing how gamification is being implemented in MOOCs, and to identify unexplored research opportunities in this field. The results show that gamification is still at an early stage in MOOCs, and it is being implemented in similar ways to those at small scale contexts.

A ORIENTAÇÃO NO AMBIENTE NATURAL: APRENDIZAGEM UBÍQUA ATRAVÉS DO USO DE TECNOLOGIA

New studies on Physical Education are appearing, showing that technology can enhance the educational process. This article describes a technology-supported learning process on orienteering as a physical activity in the natural environment. By using a case study with 65 university students and one teacher, the research allowed us to analyze how ubiquitous learning, through the use of technological tools (Augmented Reality, geolocation, etc.) supported learning of orienteering in the natural environment. Among other findings, ubiquitous learning stimulated the learning process in different physical and virtual spaces, better acquisition of orienteering contents, digital competence, and learning at different times. Apart from these potentialities, some difficulties also emerged during the process, such as concerns about the dangers of technology overshadowing students’ connections with the natural environment, lack of internet coverage, and others.