Loïc Martínez

How Blended Learning Reduces Underachievement in Higher Education: An Experience in Teaching Computer Sciences

This paper presents a blended learning approach and a study evaluating instruction in a software engineering-related course unit as part of an undergraduate engineering degree program in computing. In the past, the course unit had a lecture-based format. In view of student underachievement and the high course unit dropout rate, a distance-learning system was deployed, where students were allowed to choose between a distance-learning approach driven by a moderate constructivist instructional model or a blended-learning approach. The results of this experience are presented, with the aim of showing the effectiveness of the teaching/learning system deployed compared to the lecture-based system previously in place. The grades earned by students under the new system, following the distance-learning and blended-learning courses, are compared statistically to the grades attained in earlier years in the traditional face-to-face classroom (lecture-based) learning.

On the testability of WCAG 2.0 for beginners

Web accessibility for people with disabilities is a highly visible area of research in the field of ICT accessibility, including many policy activities across many countries. The commonly accepted guidelines for web accessibility (WCAG 1.0) were published in 1999 and have been extensively used by designers, evaluators and legislators. W3C-WAI published a new version of these guidelines (WCAG 2.0) in December 2008. One of the main goals of WCAG 2.0 was testability, that is, WCAG 2.0 should be either machine testable or reliably human testable. In this paper we present an educational experiment performed during an intensive web accessibility course. The goal of the experiment was to assess the testability of the 25 level-A success criteria of WCAG 2.0 by beginners. To do this, the students had to manually evaluate the accessibility of the same web page. The result was that only eight success criteria could be considered to be reliably human testable when evaluators were beginners. We also compare our experiment with a similar study published recently. Our work is not a conclusive experiment, but it does suggest some parts of WCAG 2.0 to which special attention should be paid when training accessibility evaluators.

Semi-automatic evaluation of web accessibility with HERA 2.0

The evaluation of the accessibility of a web site calls for the participation of human evaluators: most of the checkpoints to be assessed cannot be evaluated fully automatically. This paper presents the second version of HERA, a multilingual online tool developed by the Sidar Foundation that automatically performs a preliminary analysis of a web page and then provides support for the complete manual evaluation process. This description includes the justification for a newer version, the technologies used, and the main strengths of HERA 2.0 as compared with other tools and version 1.0

Towards a set of Measures for Evaluating Software Agent Autonomy

Agent-oriented software is an established research field. For this reason, it is important to develop comprehensive measures of excellence to evaluate this software. No set of measures defining the overall quality of an agent has been developed to date. Some attempts at evaluating agent quality have addressed certain agent features, like the development process. We believe that agent quality can be determined as a function of well-defined characteristics. Evaluated using appropriate measures, these characteristics will assure an agent’s reliability and correct functionality. This paper deals with an important agent feature, namely, autonomy. Autonomy is considered to be the agent’s ability to operate independently, without the need for human guidance or the intervention of external elements. The article proposes a set of measures used to evaluate the autonomy of a agent and presents a case study analyzing the behavior of these measures.

Cooperation between expert knowledge and data mining discovered knowledge: Lessons learned

Expert systems are built from knowledge traditionally elicited from the human expert. It is precisely knowledge elicitation from the expert that is the bottleneck in expert system construction. On the other hand, a data mining system, which automatically extracts knowledge, needs expert guidance on the successive decisions to be made in each of the system phases. In this context, expert knowledge and data mining discovered knowledge can cooperate, maximizing their individual capabilities: data mining discovered knowledge can be used as a complementary source of knowledge for the expert system, whereas expert knowledge can be used to guide the data mining process. This article summarizes different examples of systems where there is cooperation between expert knowledge and data mining discovered knowledge and reports our experience of such cooperation gathered from a medical diagnosis project called Intelligent Interpretation of Isokinetics Data, which we developed. From that experience, a series of lessons were learned throughout project development. Some of these lessons are generally applicable and others pertain exclusively to certain project types.

Measuring the Social Ability of Software Agents

To evaluate the global quality of a software agent it is necessary to define appropriate quality characteristics and to determine a set of measures for these features. A comprehensive set of measures has not yet been developed for agent-oriented software. However, some software measures have been adopted from other software paradigms, especially from the object-oriented paradigm because they have features in common. A key characteristic defining a software agent is its social ability, that is, its ability to interact with other agents to achieve its goals. This paper presents a first approximation to a set of measures for evaluating the social ability of software agents for use in the calculation of a global value for this characteristic.

Hera-FFX: a Firefox add-on for semi-automatic web accessibility evaluation

Website accessibility evaluation is a complex task requiring a combination of human expertise and software support. There are several online and offline tools to support the manual web accessibility evaluation process. However, they all have some weaknesses because none of them includes all the desired features. In this paper we present Hera-FFX, an add-on for the Firefox web browser that supports semi-automatic web accessibility evaluation.

Teaching web accessibility with “contramano” and hera

There is a need for training in design for all both at universities and in organisations, particularly as regards accessible web design. In this paper we present the experiences of the Sidar Foundation and the Technical University of Madrid in teaching web accessibility, focusing on the use of two key materials. The first one is Contramano, a fictitious web site designed to fail every accessibility checkpoint. It can be used to give examples of bad practices or as a basis for short exercises focused on specific checkpoints. The second material is the HERA tool, an on-line evaluation tool that has been designed to assist the manual evaluation of web accessibility. The paper will present the experience of using these materials in both higher education and other courses.

Discovering Similar Patterns for Characterizing Time Series in a Medical Domain

Abstract.In this article, we describe the process of discovering similar patterns in time series and creating reference models for population groups in a medical domain, and particularly in the field of physiotherapy, using data mining techniques on a set of isokinetic data. The discovered knowledge was evaluated against the expertise of a physician specialized in isokinetic techniques, and applied in the I4 (Intelligent Interpretation of Isokinetic Information) project developed in conjunction with the Spanish National Center for Sports Research and Sciences for muscular diagnosis and rehabilitation, injury prevention, training evaluation and planning, etc., of elite athletes and ordinary people.

Developing Hera-FFX for WCAG 2.0

WCAG 2.0 was published in December 2008. It has many differences to WCAG 1.0 as to rationale, structure and content. Two years later there are still few tools supporting WCAG 2.0, and none of them fully mirrors the WCAG 2.0 approach organized around principles, guidelines, success criteria, situations and techniques. This paper describes the on-going development of an update to the Hera-FFX Firefox extension to support WCAG 2.0. The description is focused on the challenges that we have found and our resulting decisions.