Mariluz Guenaga

Accessibility for e-Learning Environments

All entities involved in creating, managing and using e-Learning content and tools have a great challenge making it accessible for students and instructors with disabilities. Current accessibility guidelines have to be concreted and adapted to this context, so they can find the way to make learning process accessible and usable without too much additional work. There are complex elements, concepts and structures in e-Learning, difficult to transmit to people with disabilities and that are out of the scope of current guidelines.

Empirical Analysis of the Use of the VISIR Remote Lab in Teaching Analog Electronics

Remote laboratories give students the opportunity of experimenting in STEM by using the Internet to control and measure an experimental setting. Remote laboratories are increasingly used in the classroom to complement, or substitute for, hands-on laboratories, so it is important to know its learning value. While many authors approach this question through qualitative analyses, this paper reports a replicated quantitative study that evaluates the teaching performance of one of these resources, the virtual instrument systems in reality (VISIR) remote laboratory. VISIR, described here, is the most popular remote laboratory for basic analog electronics. This paper hypothesizes that use of a remote laboratory has a positive effect on students’ learning process. This report analyzes the effect of the use of VISIR in five different groups of students from two different academic years (2013–2014 and 2014–2015), with three teachers and at two educational levels. The empirical experience focuses on Ohm’s Law. The results obtained are reported using a pretest and post-test design. The tests were carefully designed and analyzed, and their reliability and validity were assessed. The analysis of knowledge test question results shows that the post-test scores are higher that the pretest. The difference is significant according to Wilcoxon test (

New challenges in the Bologna Process using Remote Laboratories and Learning Analytics to support teachers in continuous assessment

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A Tool to Evaluate the Level of Inclusion of Digital Learning Objects

), and produces a Cohen effect size of 1.0. The VISIR remote laboratory’s positive effect on students’ learning processes indicates that remote laboratories can produce a positive effect in students’ learning if an appropriate activity is used.

A serious game to develop and assess teamwork competency

Even if we want or not, whatever the consequences are, we are in Bologna and we have to carry out certain tasks, among them the development of competencies and the coherent and continuous evaluation. Within competencies we can find the instrumental ones, where Remote Laboratories may play a relevant role complementing theory and practice. Assessment can be carried out using the same tool, and integrating Learning Analytics techniques to support the evaluation and make it automatic.

Augmented Reality for maintenance operator training using SURF points and homography

Inclusive learning integrates pedagogical and technological variables. It means to adapt to students according to their characteristics (personal, physical, cognitive, social…), needs and interests. With the aim of evaluating the level of inclusion of digital learning objects we have developed a questionnaire that collects information about pedagogical and technological aspects that promote or discourage inclusion. Features like the pedagogical model, function of activities, type of assessment, multimedia resources, human-computer interaction, accessibility and usability criteria, etc. are variables that impact in the level of inclusion of educational objects and items that have been included in the questionnaire. This is the second version of the tool, refined with the conclusions obtained from the application of the draft version to more than 50 learning objects developed under the funding and supervision of the Basque Government. These objects are available under Creative Commons license in the Agrega web page of the Education Department, and represent the style and characteristics of more than 350 objects.

Smartphones and teenagers, threat or opportunity

In this paper we present the main basis of teamwork competency, and how we integrate its development and assessment in a serious game we are developing at the University of Deusto. We describe the game-design process, methodology used, and how it affects the final design. Some of the analyzed aspects of gamification are also pointed out. It describes how we include development mechanisms to assess and monitor teamwork competency. The game collects, without interfering with the user, the necessary data to measure teamwork competency, and to enable the complete analysis of the project within the company in which it is used.

A web platform for the assessment of competences in Mobile Learning Contexts

We present a system, PortableAR, that aims to provide Augmented Reality (AR) to diverse environments, like guided tourism visits or industrial maintenance tasks. The first version relied on AR tags and had low accuracy while the last version provides a successful AR experience using SURF and homography.

Data Analysis of Coaching and Advising in Undergraduate Students. An Analytic Approach

Within the 3rd International Digital Citizenship Conference celebrated in San Sebastian-Spain in May 8th, we took part in a round table debate about the use of Smartphone in education with teenagers. There is an open discussion about the benefits or threats of using such an innovative technology. Usually the main trend is to forbid the use of mobile phones in the classroom. We bet for considering the use of any technology if it can benefit somehow our learning/teaching process. Smartphones are very powerful devices that can be used in many innovative ways. We can profit their availability, since many students have one. In this paper we analyze how different authors understand mobile learning, we review previous experiences and their results in educational institutions using mobile learning, and we reflect on the threats and opportunities of using mobile devices in education. Finally we show an approach to a new educational paradigm that is being implemented thanks to the educational revolution derived from the use of mobile devices and we provide simple guidelines for its implementation.

Make World, A Collaborative Platform to Develop Computational Thinking and STEAM

Society demands new competences from professionals, who require having specific skills and abilities. Universities, accordingly, have changed from a content-based towards a competency-based educational model. However, the assessment of these competences is not a scalable task, has a subjective nature and must consider data from many different sources. This paper describes the model, architecture and objectives of an on-going research project aimed at developing a web platform called LACAMOLC, to provide teachers and students a dashboard which gathers usage and social data from different Knowledge and Learning Technologies such as Moodle, Google Apps for Education and MediaWiki to provide visual and learning analytics visualizations to support learning and assessment process. We select Pentaho as our analytics specific tool, based on its characteristics in order to effectively scale learning analytics systems and achieve long-term sustainability and scalability, and we design an experiment to carry out for teamwork competence.