Miguel Latorre

The color of the light: A remote laboratory that uses a smart device that connects teachers and students

Technology surrounds us wherever we look, nonetheless it is necessary to facilitate its use in places where a greater public can enjoy, know and learn with it. Techno Museum and Go Lab projects are focused on this goal. As a first prototype to bring technology closer to young students and schools, UNED has developed a Arduino based smart device that facilitates the integration of remote laboratories in learning scenarios. Initially, the Arduino smart device was designed for robotics laboratories, but finally it was decided to expand it to other laboratories. The current prototype is called RGB led: “The color of the light” laboratory. This paper presents its use by teachers and their potential applications as a tool to bring technology to schools and young people who tomorrow will become engineers, scientists and curious citizens.

Generic integration of remote laboratories in public learning tools: Organizational and technical challenges

Educational remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real equipment located in universities as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Federations of these remote laboratories have existed for years, focused on allowing two universities to share their equipment. Additionally, the integration of remote laboratories in Learning Tools-LT-(Learning Management Systems, Content Management Systems or Personal Learning Environments) has been achieved in the past in order to integrate remote laboratories as part of the learning curricula, being part of the practice exercises or even as a tool of evaluation. An cross-institutional initiative called gateway4labs has been created to perform this integration through federation protocols. In this contribution, this initiative adds support for OpenSocial as a new protocol for Learning Tools (in particular, for EPFL Graasp), as well as for the iLab Shared Architecture (in addition to WebLab-Deusto and UNR FCEIA laboratories already supported). Supporting OpenSocial opens a number of new technical and organizational challenges since public labs should be supported without registering students, teachers or schools. The focus of this contribution is to show these challenges and how they are tackled in the proposed open source implementation.

A review of webapp authoring tools for e-learning

The lack of tracking and storing capabilities for the results of Web-based learning activities is an issue that remains unsolved. Transitions or interactions defined by teachers through a set of conditions still require programming skills that stay far beyond the desired final results. In addition to this, authoring tools should be powerful enough to let lecturers generate contents which are high-quality, interactive, and tuned to each students cognitive preferences and progress. Availability and processing capabilities, or motivation, relevance, etc., must also be aspects to address in this context. For these reasons, this paper aims to review the existing Web application authoring toolkits focusing on distance education. In particular, we analize their main features, requirements and issues, as well as the most promising areas for future improvemenst in this field.

Middleware solutions for service-oriented remote laboratories: A review

The evolution of Web 3.0 and consequently eLearning 3.0 have demanded a major change of the way learning objects are provided and implemented. It is foreseen that learning objects in eLearning 3.0 should be interoperable and easily discovered, and will represent any kind of virtual or physical object. Several approaches attempted to implement remote Laboratories as a Service (LaaS) in order to achieve such interoperability and to allow their integration into heterogeneous educational systems for pedagogical purposes and for more convenience, as well as, their coupling and mashing up with other learning objects in order to yield a scaffold and rich educational environment. This paper provides a broad study on the available middleware solutions for service-oriented remote laboratories implementation, emphasizing the pros and cons of each and the upcoming challenges in developing service-oriented remote laboratories.

A Good Practice Example on Learning Object Reutilization

Creating, cataloguing and distributing high quality learning contents requires a significant investment of resources and time. Nowadays information technology applied as a tool in education has drastically reduced these efforts. It makes it possible to share, use and exchange digital documents under certain conditions specified by the author without any cost. Furthermore, the use of standards can improve development and reutilization. Learning objects are the new paradigm developed for spreading knowledge and increasing interoperability through metadata.

OpenSocial Application Builder and Customizer for School Teachers

Nowadays, a large number of online laboratories are available and deployed throughout the world. Most of them are sponsored by universities and often only used by their home institution, because they tend to be dedicated to the needs of their creators. However, in many cases these labs provide successful experiences and other teachers would wish to incorporate them into their classroom activities and to embrace Learning-by-Experience methodologies. Currently, they cannot do that effectively without first tailoring the lab experience to their own teaching style and the educational background of their students. This can be a complicated affair, due the closed nature of many online labs and the steep learning curve of the few tools that allow customization. This paper describes the work on an application builder, named App Composer, which aims to make it easy for school teachers to create their own customized applications from existing ones. Different customization levels are provided, each one powered by a different type of composer. For instance, teachers will be able to easily translate an application into a new language, or to start with a template and create a customized version of an application. The App Composer makes use of Graasp and Open Social - a widely-used, interoperable and open technology.

Teaching technology with CLIL methodology: A case study

Bilingual English education is increasing in Spain, and especially in Madrid Region. The number of Universities, High Schools and Primary School is higher each year and the demand from Society about this kind of education has made the amount of students involved to grow up exponentially throughout the last decade. In the present paper, the experience in the last two years in the department of Technology of Institute “Ramiro de Maeztu” is described in relation with the technical education of the students attended. CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) is the methodology applied to common bilingual subject, but in the case of pre-engineering studies, the methodology is combined with a new perspective of Technology subject focused in innovation and entrepreneurship.

Information Technologies Supporting Learning.

The massive, simultaneous redesign of all degrees in European Higher Education Area presents daunting challenges but also offers unprecedented opportunities. All degrees must be simultaneously redesigned; synergies among them can be effectively exploited, thus encouraging the re-utilization oriented approaches discussed in this paper (LCMS, standards like LOM, Dublin Corem QTI, IMS, SCORM, etc.). On the other hand, shifting the unit of academic measurement to student hours (through the ECTS) facilitates the seamless combination of face-to-face, distance and blended learning in academic degrees.

A Generalized Proposal to Support Development and Reuse of Practical Educational Scenarios in LMSs

This paper introduces a generalized solution to support the development and reuse of practical educational scenarios. It is intended to complement the reuse initiatives already proposed for LMS resources, such as LOM, SCORM or IMS. These initiatives are mainly focused in media contents. By the contrary, this proposal is concerned with the tools that can be used in practical educational scenarios: simulators, remote labs, communication tools, etc. It considers the way in which these tools can be described, but also the way in which these tools are intended to be used. At this point, three main issues are supported: authorizations, awareness and interaction. This proposal is part of a more comprehensible development based in the language PoEML. It extends the IMS learning design capabilities to support practical scenarios through a generalized solution.

Sharing Existing Knowledge between E-Learning Platforms: Enhancing Interoperability

The arrival of new technologies to universities creates new situations and problems that must be solved in order to improve the care, support and tutoring provided to students. In many cases, the communication flows between teachers and students place an excessive demand on the teachers response capacity. This paper describes a system designed to answer automatically the questions of students, using the existing knowledge stored in e-learning platforms, such as dotLRN or Moodle; indexed in search engines, as Google or Yahoo; or data repositories as wikis.