Julià Minguillón

E-learning personalization based on itineraries and long-term navigational behavior

In this paper we describe a practical framework for studying then a navigational behavior of the users of an e-learning environment integrated in a virtual campus. The students navigate through the web based virtual campus interacting with learning resources which are structured following the SCORM e-learning standard. Our main goal is to design a usage mining tool for analyzing such user navigational behavior and for extracting relevant information that can be used to validate several aspects related to virtual campus design and usability but also to determine the optimal scheduling for each course depending on user profile. We intend to extend these quencing capabilities of the SCORM standard to include the concept of recommended itinerary, by combining teachers expertise with learned experience acquired by system usage analysis.

Towards personalization in digital libraries through ontologies

Purpose – To describe a browsing and searching personalization system for digital libraries based on the use of ontologies for describing the relationships between all the elements which take part in a digital library scenario of use.Design/methodology/approach – Identification of all the desired functionalities and requirements that are necessary to fully integrate the use of a digital library in an e‐learning environment, and the basic elements that are used to build the ontology that describes such scenario.Findings – The elements that determine the functionalities of the desired personalization system: first, the users profile, including navigational history and user preferences; and second, the information collected from the navigational behavior of the digital library users.Research limitations/implications – The ontology is not complete. In fact, the ontology in itself will evolve with the new apparition of desired functionalities and requirements of the personalization system.Practical implicatio...

User Navigational Behavior in e-Learning Virtual Environments

In this paper, we describe the navigational behavior of the students of an e-learning virtual environment, in order to determine whether such navigational patterns are related to the academic performance achieved by the students or not, and which behaviors can be identified as more successful. As an example, a subset of students taking a degree in computer science in a completely virtual online university is selected as the matter of study. Three levels of analysis are described: a session level, where students perform a few actions in a single session logged to the virtual campus; a course level, where all single sessions are joined to form a course navigational pattern; and a lifelong learning level, where students enroll in several subjects each academic semester. A simple experiment is outlined for the course level to demonstrate the possibilities of such analysis in a virtual e-learning environment. This experiment shows that the information collected in this level is useful for understanding user behavior and the relationship with his or her academic achievements, and that some intuitive ideas about the relevance of specific user actions or particularities can be also better explained.

Enriching e‐learning metadata through digital library usage analysis

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to propose an evaluation framework for analyzing learning objects usage, with the aim of extracting useful information for improving the quality of the metadata used to describe the learning objects, but also for personalization purposes, including user models and adaptive itineraries.Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents experimental results from the log usage analysis during one academic semester of two different subjects, 350 students. The experiment examines raw server log data generated from the interactions of the students with the classroom learning objects, in order to find relevant information that can be used to improve the metadata used for describing both the learning objects and the learning process.Findings – Preliminary studies have been carried out in order to obtain an initial picture of the interactions between learners and the virtual campus, including both services and resources usage. These studies try to establish relationships bet...

A Robust Audio Watermarking Scheme Based on MPEG 1 Layer 3 Compression

This paper describes an audio watermarking scheme based on lossy compression. The main idea is taken from an image watermarking approach where the JPEG compression algorithm is used to determine where and how the mark should be placed. Similarly, in the audio scheme suggested in this paper, an MPEG 1 Layer 3 algorithm is chosen for compression to determine the position of the mark bits and, thus, the psychoacoustic masking of the MPEG 1 Layer 3 compression is implicitly used. This methodology provides with a high robustness degree against compression attacks. The suggested scheme is also shown to succeed against most of the StirMark benchmark attacks for audio.

Wikipedia at university: what faculty think and do about it

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate university faculty perceptions and practices of using Wikipedia as a teaching resource. Design/methodology/approach – This study is based on a large survey to all faculty members in two large public universities. A total of 913 valid responses were collected through an online questionnaire with 9 control variables and 41 Likert-scaled questions. Findings – The results do not support an overwhelming sceptical attitude among faculty towards Wikipedia. The overall quality of Wikipedia articles is highly valued and most faculty are regular users, just as students are. Though most faculty show a positive view on the teaching usefulness of Wikipedia, few of them actually use it for teaching purposes. A certain conflict has been detected between standard academic procedures of knowledge building and the open collaborative model on which Wikipedia rests. In the end, two important factors play a role in shaping faculty views: their colleagues’ perceived opinion...

Extending Learning Objects by Means of Social Networking

Learning objects have been the promise of providing people with high quality learning resources. Initiatives such as MIT OpenCourseWare, MERLOT and others have shown the real possibilities of creating and sharing knowledge through Internet. Thousands of educational resources are available through learning object repositories. We indeed live in an age of content abundance, and content can be considered as infrastructure for building adaptive and personalized learning paths, promoting both formal and informal learning. Nevertheless, although most educational institutions are adopting a more open approach, publishing huge amounts of educational resources, the reality is that these resources are barely used in other educational contexts. This paradox can be partly explained by the difficulties in adapting such resources with respect to language, e-learning standards and specifications and, finally, granularity. Furthermore, if we want our learners to use and take advantage of learning object repositories, we need to provide them with additional services than just browsing and searching for resources. Social networks can be a first step towards creating an open social community of learning around a topic or a subject. In this paper we discuss and analyze the process of using a learning object repository and building a social network on the top of it, with respect to the information architecture needed to capture and store the interaction between learners and resources in form of learning object metadata

Total disclosure of the embedding and detection algorithms for a secure digital watermarking scheme for audio

This paper discusses the modification of a robust digital audio watermarking scheme to allow the disclosure of the embedding and detection algorithms. The chosen scheme uses MPEG 1 Layer 3 compression to determine the position of the mark bits in the frequency domain. The marking positions would be exposed if the original embedding algorithm was disclosed. In fact, it is shown that even if an attacker did not know the exact tuning parameters used for embedding, he or she could still produce an approximate superset of the marking frequencies from only a marked copy and successfully attack the file. To avoid this problem, a secret key is introduced in the embedding and detection processes. The secret key includes the seed of a pseudo-random number generator which is used to compute the exact marking positions. The modification is then analysed in terms of capacity, imperceptibility, robustness and security. The experiments show that the modified scheme preserves most of the properties of the original one, such as robustness against MP3 compression for the most frequently used bit rates, and does introduce additional security as the mark is more difficult to erase when the embedding and detection algorithms are disclosed.

Wavelet lossless compression of ultraspectral sounder data

This paper provides a study concerning the suitability of well-known image coding techniques originally devised for lossy compression of still natural images when applied to lossless compression of ultraspectral sounder data. An ultraspectral sounder generates an unprecedented amount of 3D data, consisting of two spatial and one spectral dimensions; with ultraspectral sounder data, better inference of atmospheric, cloud and surface parameters is feasible. Here we present the experimental results of five widespread wavelet-based coding techniques, namely EZW, IC, SPIHT, JPEG2000 and CCSDS-IDC. Since the considered still image coding techniques are 2D in nature, but the ultraspectral data is 3D, a preprocessing step is applied to convert the two spatial dimensions into a single one. We are also interested in analyzing the benefits of applying some pre-processing step (e.g., linear prediction or bias adjusted reordering) prior to the coding process in order to further exploit the spectral correlation, which is much stronger than the spatial correlation.

User Centered Design of a Learning Object Repository

This work outlines the design process of a user centered learning object repository. A repository should foster the development and acquisition of both generic and specific informational competencies. The results of the first stage of the user centered design process are presented which provide a clear understanding of user and task requirements and the context of use. A user study was conducted using quantitative and qualitative methodologies. A qualitative approach was performed through the content analysis of 24 in-depth interviews achieved through a random stratified sampling method. Regarding the quantitative approach, more than 5 million student navigation sessions were processed in order to know the real information behavior accomplished in the virtual campus and more specifically all the services and resources used and the search actions carried out by users. Our aim is to achieve a thorough informational behavior analysis that involves access, treatment, integration, evaluation, creation and communication of information for learning purposes which will be useful for integrating learning object repositories in virtual learning environments.