Nikolas Galanis

Developing win-win solutions for virtual placements in informatics: the VALS case

The placements and internships are one of the main paths to get professional background and some skills for students, especially in areas like informatics and computer sciences. The European-funded VALS project tries to promote the virtual placements and establish a new initiative in virtual placements called Semester of Code. This initiative binds higher education institutions, students, companies, foundations and Open Source projects in order to create virtual placements and solve needs that they have in relation with those placements. This paper introduces some projects about virtual placements that other institutions and companies perform, also the paper describes the needs, opinions and considerations about the virtual placements for each stakeholder involved in the placements, to finally explain the design decisions and actions behind the Semester of Code, and how they are intended to get better virtual placements and successful results.

Requirements for Successful Wikis in Collaborative Educational Scenarios

What are the requirements for the Wiki engines to be used collaborative learning activities? Can any general-purpose engine be used? Or is there a niche for an educationally oriented crop of wiki engines? Do these educational wikis need to be integrated within the LMS to frame the collaborative activity within the walls of the virtual classroom, or is it preferable to have an external engine? These questions arise to every teacher who is about to plan a wiki-based collaborative learning activity. In this paper, the authors examine the use of wikis in college courses at three universities. The findings of this research are introduced and adopted as new features in two major open source wiki engines used for education: the Wiki module for Moodle 2.0 (as a Wiki engine embedded inside a LMS) and Tiki as independent full-featured Wiki CMS/Groupware engine.

Adoption of Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS): A Risk Management Perspective

Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) has become a strategic asset in software development, and open source communities behind FLOSS are a key player in the field. The analysis of open source community dynamics is a key capability in risk management practices focused on the integration of FLOSS in all types of organizations. We are conducting research in developing methodologies for managing risks of FLOSS adoption and deployment in various application domains. This paper is about the ability to systematically capture, filter, analyze, reason about, and build theories upon, the behavior of an open source community in combination with the structured elicitation of expert opinions on potential organizational business risk. The novel methodology presented here blends together qualitative and quantitative information as part of a wider analytics platform. The approach combines big data analytics with automatic scripting of scenarios that permits experts to assess risk indicators and business risks in focused tactical and strategic workshops. These workshops generate data that is used to construct Bayesian networks that map data from community risk drivers into statistical distributions that are feeding the platform risk management dashboard. A special feature of this model is that the dynamics of an open source community are tracked using social network metrics that capture the structure of unstructured chat data. The method is illustrated with a running example based on experience gained in implementing our approach in an academic smart environment setting including Mood bile, a Mobile Learning for Moodle (www.moodbile.org). This example is the first in a series of planned experiences in the domain of smart environments with the ultimate goal of deriving a complete risk model in that field.

TSUGI: a framework for building PHP-based learning tools

Innovation on ICT-based learning depends on the ability of researchers, developers and services (and content) providers to push new kinds of tools and services in real life contexts. This implies that new developments need to be interoperable with the current LMS that are running almost everywhere. Thus, either new developments have to be custom built for every LMS or there is a real need for an interoperability standard Over the last 8 years IMS Global Learning Consortium has pushed the IMS Learning tools interoperability as the missing standard. IMS LTI has been developed in collaboration with the major LMS and tools authors in a long process where reference implementations and automated compliance tests have been created, and IMS LTI is supported for all the major commercial and open source LMS. But despite the collaborative open process there are different versions of the standard (Simple LTI, Basic LTI, LTI 1.0, LTI 1.1 and soon LTI 2.0) and there are subtle differences in the implementation of LTI provided by each LMS, which defeats the whole purpose of having an interoperability standard. For this reason the TSUGI project has been created: to provide a framework that makes as simple as possible to develop and deploy LTI applications.

Supporting, evaluating and validating informal learning. A social approach

Informal learning has been a global hot topic for the past several years. The growth of the internet and the pervasiveness of computers in everyday life means that a huge part of this informal learning is done through a computer. In the European Union, since the official recognition of informal learning in 1999 with the Bologna Treaty, a number of guidelines and proposals have been published providing techniques and recommendations for translating informal learning outcomes to formal competences. Most of these guidelines depend on an evaluator (internal or external) to oversee and certify the process. In our work, we propose the usage of a more social and dynamic framework for gathering, validating and promoting a learners digital informal learning. This framework is based primarily on peer interaction and peer assessment instead of employing experts and provides mechanisms for personalized recommendations in order to introduce further informal learning opportunities to the learners. We propose an approach where a learners evaluation happens organically while other learners adopt the same activities and evaluate them positively or negatively. Informal learning (IL) is currently a very hot topic.The majority of existing proposals use formal procedures for validating IL.We propose social framework for the validation and promotion of informal learning.Learners evaluate each others activities by tagging, adopting and commenting them.A recommender system helps learners discover new activities and promotes IL.

A social framework for supporting, evaluating and validating informal learning

Validation of informal learning has been a hot topic in the European Union the past few years. A number of guidelines and proposals have been published providing competence catalogues for direct transition from informal to formal learning. In our work, we propose the usage of a more social and dynamic framework for validating and promoting a learners informal learning.

Integration of Google Docs as a Collaborative Activity within the LMS Using IMS BasicLTI

Google Docs is a well-known suite of online collaborative tools for document processing, spreadsheets, online presentations, drawing and even quizzes. Google Docs has the potential to become a powerful tool within and LMS course, primarily due to its collaborative qualities. This paper presents an integration that using the IMS BLTI standard turns Google Docs into an engine that powers collaborative learning activities within the Moodle LMS platform.

Learning Assessment Using Wikis: Integrated or LMS Independent?

Wikis have a potentially huge educational value. This article outlines a feature set that wiki engines need in order to successfully host collaborative educational scenarios using wiki technology. One of the first issues to solve is the need for assessment methodologies supported by the software. And the second one is to choose between using an integrated wiki engine inside the Learning Management System (LMS), or an external standalone wiki engine. Advantages and disadvantages from both options of this second issue are discussed, with each choice presenting different implications as far as individual student assessment, feedback and grading are concerned. Among the expected results, the most notable are incentives to incorporate wikis in the teaching procedure, significant enhancements in usability, as well as allowing teachers to provide more timely written feedback on their students’ individual contributions on wiki based activities, on top of the usual numerical grading.

Designing an informal learning support framework

Informal learning, alongside competence-based learning and learning outcomes is getting a lot of attention lately. A large number of countries and organizations are busy defining guidelines for validating and evaluating informal learning experiences and formalizing its outcomes. In a globalized society where technology has brought together different cultures and educational systems, managing to keep track of a learners competences is a daunting task, and especially when trying to take into account the competences acquired through informal means. We are proposing a framework to gather, organize, evaluate and showcase a users informal learning using a largely social approach.

Validation of informal learning

In this paper, we describe our PhD research proposal for the Education in the Knowledge Society program of the University of Salamanca. Our research centers on defining a framework for structuring and validating an individuals informal learning in order to be able to represent the competences gained through informal means, alongside their formal curriculum.