Luis de Marcos

Swarm intelligence in e-learning: a learning object sequencing agent based on competencies

In e-learning initiatives content creators are usually required to arrange a set of learning resources in order to present them in a comprehensive way to the learner. Course materials are usually divided into reusable chunks called Learning Objects (LOs) and the ordered set of LOs is called sequence, so the process is called LO sequencing. In this paper an intelligent agent that performs the LO sequencing process is presented. Metadata and competencies are used to define relations between LOs so that the sequencing problem can be characterized as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) and artificial intelligent techniques can be used to solve it. A Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) agent is proposed, built, tuned and tested. Results show that the agent succeeds in solving the problem and that it handles reasonably combinatorial explosion inherent to this kind of problems.

A Critical Analysis of EU-Funded eParticipation

This chapter reflects, from a holistic perspective, on the challenges surrounding the development of eParticipation in Europe, with special focus on EU programmes. To this end, first, we assess the field’s practical and theoretical achievements and limitations, and corroborate that the progress of eParticipation in the last decade has not been completely satisfactory in spite of the significant share of resources invested to support it. Second, we attempt to diagnose and shed light on some of the field’s systemic problems and challenges which are responsible for this lack of development. The domain’s maladies are grouped under tree main categories: (1) lack of a proper understanding and articulation with regard to the ‘participation’ field, (2) eParticipation community’s ‘founding biases’ around eGovernment and academy, and (3) inadequacy of traditional innovation support programmes to incentivize innovation in the field. In the context of the ‘Europe 2020 Strategy’, the final section provides several recommendations that should contribute to enhance the effectiveness of future European eParticipation actions.

Evaluating Simple Query Interface Compliance in Public Repositories

Standards and specifications widely accepted and used lay the foundations to enable and facilitate the interoperability among systems, and the software maintenance and reuse, especially within the scope of learning objects’ search systems. One of these standards is the SQI (Standard Query Interface) specification by the European Committee for Standardization in which many search systems, including public ones, are based. This paper analyzes the degree of compliance with this specification by a significant number of learning objects repositories.

Assessment design: A step towards interoperability

The assessment in e‐learning systems is a basic element to successfully complete any formative action. In this article we present a generic, flexible, interoperable and reusable language for design assessments, and its implementation in the EDVI Learning Management System. This language is based on XML and we have used XML Schema technology. We also describe the language attributes required to set the assessment plan based on our practical experience in e‐learning courses. The main purpose of this language is to make the assessment design interoperable among systems in a simple and efficient way. An adequate implementation will also reduce the time required to configure assessment activities, simplifying and automating them.

Automatic E-learning contents composition by using gap analysis techniques

A goal of e-learning is to increase efficiency by precisely identifying the training a student needs, and providing that training in the context of day to day activities of the students [1]. This paper describes how the use of IA algorithms can be utilized to automatically generate customized learning contents on elearning environments. On top of that, we also propose the inclusion in the whole process of digital rights, as in our opinion, its a way to make up for contents creators and to encourage them to create better, more useful materials.

A multidisciplinary computer science master program

This paper presents the University of Alcala attempt to join computer science and information engineering with other fields (business, law, pedagogy, nursery and humanities) in a Masters Program. The main objective of this approach is to attract graduate students to computer science offering them an alternative way to join its own knowledge and competencies with those in computing skills which are closely related.

Evolutionary approaches for curriculum sequencing

The process of creating e-learning courseware using reusable learning objects (LOs) can be broken down in two sub-processes: LOs finding and LO sequencing. Sequencing is usually performed by instructors, who create courses targeting generic profiles rather than personalized materials. This paper proposes an evolutionary approach to automate this latter problem while, simultaneously, encourages reusability and interoperability by promoting standards employment.

An interoperable assessment language proposal

The activities related to the assessment process are essential in any learning action. We propose an XML-based language for the design of an assessment plan. The main purpose of this language is to make the assessment design interoperable among systems in a simple and efficient way. An adequate implementation will also reduce the time required to configure assessment activities, simplifying and automating them.

The informational foundation of the act

This paper presents a theory to quantify the informational value of human acts. We argue that living is functioning against entropy. Acting is presented as a set of decisions and choices to create order that we use as the foundation to develop the concept of complexity of human acts. Frequency theory of probability is then applied to characterize human acts in terms of their degree of freedom and to set up a scale of the information and predictability carried out in human decisions. A taxonomy is also included in the scale categorizing acts as destructive, mechanical, ludic or vital according to their complexity. A formulation to estimate the informational value of human individual and collective acts follows. The final part of the paper presents and discuss the consequences of our theory. We argue that technological artifacts embed information and that modernization can be understood as a one-way process to embed acts of ever increasing levels of complexity in devices. However, the total amount of information is conserved and modernity only enables us to redistribute our informational potential. Agnumetry is introduced as a method to quantify modernity. Finally we outline the relation between the informational value of production and the informational value of consumption (operative information), and between them and market value, price and money.

A system for usable unification of interfaces of learning objects in m-learning

This article proposes a system for unification of interfaces of learning objects in m-learning, and it explains the part which is currently being developed in a doctoral dissertation.