Ruth Cobos

Promoting Metacognitive Skills through Peer Scaffolding in a CSCL Environment.

This paper aims to better understand the development of students’ metacognitive learning processes when participating actively in a CSCL system called KnowCat. To this end, a longitudinal case study was designed, in which 18 university students took part in a 12-month (two semesters) learning project. The students followed an instructional process, using specific features of the KnowCat design to support and improve their interaction processes, especially peer-learning processes. Our research involved both supervising the students’ collaborative learning processes throughout the learning project and focusing our analysis on the qualitative evolution of their interaction processes and of their metacognitive learning processes. The results of the current research suggest that the pedagogical use of the KnowCat system may favour and improve the development of the students’ metacognitive learning processes. In addition, the implications of the design of CSCL networks and related pedagogical issues are discussed.

Extending Deep Meta-Modelling for Practical Model-Driven Engineering

Meta-modelling is one of the pillars of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), where it is used for language engineering and domain modelling. Even though the current trend is the use of two-level meta-modelling frameworks, several researchers have pointed out limitations of this scheme for some scenarios and suggested a metamodelling approach with an arbitrary number of meta-levels in order to obtain more flexible and simpler system descriptions. Unfortunately, such multi-level meta-modelling systems are still in their infancy, lacking for example, integration with model manipulation languages, a characterization of different possibilities for instantiation and inheritance, and primitives for interconnecting multi-level languages in a flexible way. In this paper, we propose a number of extensions to multi-level (also called deep) meta-modelling, based on the needs raised by its use for practical MDE. In particular, we discuss on the issues related to code generation from deep languages, the benefits of allowing inheritance at every meta-level, and patterns and techniques for a fine-grain control of the meta-level of elements. Finally, we provide primitives to control the impedance mismatch when connecting models at different meta-levels.

Social Media Learning: An approach for composition of multimedia interactive object in a collaborative learning environment

Multimedia resources offer an opportunity to innovate and improve teaching and learning environments through the interactivity. However, the interactivity is weakly supported by current learning environments and there is a lack of tools to build this type of material. Therefore, this paper describes a new collaborative environment for composing multimedia-interactive learning objects, called Social Media Learning (SMLearning). This environment includes a methodological guideline and a Social Media platform. This article presents details about Authoring Tool and Multimedia Player, which have been tested in a blended learning experience with a postgraduate course at the University Autónoma of Madrid, where students and teachers have been worked together for generating multimedia-interactive educational material.

Integrating open services for building educational environments

The increasing popularity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has raised the need for highly scalable, customizable, open learning environments. At the same time, there is a growing trend to open the services that the companies offer on the web with open APIs and in the form of REST services, facilitating their integration in customized applications. The goal of this work is to show how such open services can be used for the support of on-line educational systems. These services were not created for an education context, so it is necessary to complement it with functionalities for supporting aspects such as evaluations, monitoring or collaboration. This article discusses on the strategies for integrating services for education and presents two cases studies: first, SMLearning, a collaborative learning environment supported by social media platforms Facebook and YouTube, and second, an application for project-based programming courses, customized through a generative architecture, making heavy use of Google services.

A Motivation Booster proposal based on the monitoring of users´ progress in CSCL environments

The main focus of the proposed approach in this paper is to provide to CSCL users personalized and summarized feedback on the completed collaborative learning activities. The main purpose of this approach is to improve CSCL environments through the provision of a Motivation Booster by monitoring the users´ progress in the system. The implementation of the booster is embedded in two specific systems: the Learning Management System (LMS) known as Moodle and a CSCL called KnowCat. Several research studies are performed with the aim to test both implementations of the Motivation Booster in the mentioned systems. These research studies are carried out with groups of students and teachers from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) and from the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Monteria, Colombia).

A Proposal of Awareness Services for the Construction of Quality Community Knowledge Supported by the Knowledge Management System KnowCat

It is well known that members of work groups need awareness about one another, about shared elements, and about the group process. We present a generic framework of awareness services for groupware systems. The proposed approach has been tested through the implementation of a prototype composed by several awareness services for the Knowledge Management system called KnowCat. KnowCat is a groupware that supports the collaborative construction of quality community knowledge. We carried out a research study with a group of students enrolled in a graduate course at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain) to test our approach. The study outcomes corroborated that providing to the KnowCat users the most useful information about how the classmates have interacted with the system through the awareness services, can help them to know how they should solve their own work in the system and to be aware that they are working in a collaborative way.

Towards the Extension of a LMS with Social Media Services

The Social Media is a term used to define a wide range of network tools or technologies, which deal with the social aspects of internet as a channel of communication, collaboration and creative expression. This type of environments has been used for educational practices in different areas, competing sometimes with e-learning institutional environments, such as the Learning Management Systems LMS. This paper proposes the extension of a specific LMS, Moodle, through Social Media services. This plugin provide the interaction and collaboration of all users. The main aim of the proposed approach is to enrich the existing educational process provided by this LMS.

Designing and Evaluating Collaborative Learning Scenarios in Moodle LMS Courses

The main purpose of this paper is to present a service called Teaching Assistant. The aim of the assistant is to facilitate the task and assessment management in collaborative learning scenarios. This assistant intends to help instructors to design and to evaluate collaborative learning tasks in this type of scenarios. For the development of the Teaching Assistant we defined an instructional model based on the Group Investigation method. The implementation of the assistant is embedded into the Learning Management System Moodle. Nowadays, a research study has been performing with students and instructors at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, UPB-Monteria Colombia. The objective of the study is to identify the effect of the Teaching Assistant in the design process of the collaborative learning scenarios scripted by the instructors in Moodle. Specifically, how the assistant decreases the time used in this process. Due to this improvement, the learning experiences can be better.

ESMAP: A Multi-agent Platform for Extending a Knowledge Management System

For more than one decade knowledge management has taken advantage of some abilities that software agents are endowed with. Agent features such as autonomy, cooperation, communication, and learning capacity have been used to improve the performance of knowledge management applications. In this paper we outline our proposal for implementing a Jade-based multi-agent platform to enhance the potential of KnowCat: a fully consolidated, thoroughly tested and validated knowledge management system which has been in active use at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain) since 1998. We also give a succinct description of the agent platform architecture and a brief presentation of its current status

Using collaborative learning scenarios to teach programming to non‐CS majors

This article presents a new approach based on “collaborative scenarios” to enhance teaching–learning programming in non‐Computer Science oriented curricula. In this context, a literature review of tools related to teaching programming since a collaborative approach is presented. The collaborative scenarios was supported by a platform called TASystem, and applied in a case study carried out with students from Topographic Engineering Department at the Universidad del Valle (Colombia). The students’ social interaction was analyzed with Social Network Analysis and Content Analysis techniques and so was the students’ performance. The results showed an improvement in the students’ performance and an increment in the social relationship among the students.