21st Century Learning for 21st Century Skills

I want to argue in this lecture, that life – especially educational life – is never that simple. What exactly are 21

st

century skills? How, for example, do they differ from ‘knowledge’? And once we know what they are, does there follow a strategy – or at least a set of principles – for what learning should look like, and the roles we ascribe to technology? Most importantly, if 21

st

century knowledge is qualitatively different from the 19

th

and 20

th

century knowledge that characterises much of our existing curricula, we will need to consider carefully just how to make that knowledge learnable and accessible through the design of digital technologies and their evaluation.

Recommender systems in e-learning have different goals as compared to those in other domains. This brings about new requirements such as the need for techniques that recommend learning resources beyond their similarity. It is therefore an ongoing challenge to develop recommender systems considering the particularities of e-learning scenarios like CROKODIL. CROKODIL is a platform supporting the collaborative acquisition and management of learning resources. It supports collaborative semantic tagging thereby forming a folksonomy. Research shows that additional semantic information in extended folksonomies can be used to enhance graph-based recommendations. In this paper, CROKODIL’s folksonomy is analysed, focusing on its hierarchical activity structure. Activities help learners structure their tasks and learning goals. AScore and AInheritScore are proposed approaches for recommending learning resources by exploiting the additional semantic information gained from activity structures. Results show that this additional semantic information is beneficial for recommending learning resources in an application scenario like CROKODIL.

This paper elaborates on the evaluation of a Metacognitive Scaffolding Service (MSS), which has been integrated into an already existing and mature medical training simulator. The MSS is envisioned to facilitate self-regulated learning (SRL) through thinking prompts and appropriate learning hints enhancing the use of metacognitive strategies. The MSS is developed in the European ImREAL (Immersive Reflective Experience-based Adaptive Learning) project that aims to augment simulated learning environments throughout services that are decoupled from the simulation itself. Results comparing a baseline evaluation of the ‘pure’ simulator (

N

=131) and a first user trial including the MSS (

N

=143) are presented. The findings indicate a positive effect on learning motivation and perceived performance with consistently good usability. The MSS and simulator are perceived as an entity by medical students involved in the study. Further steps of development are discussed and outlined.

Paper interfaces offer tremendous possibilities for geometry education in primary schools. Existing computer interfaces designed to learn geometry do not consider the integration of conventional school tools, which form the part of the curriculum. Moreover, most of computer tools are designed specifically for individual learning, some propose group activities, but most disregard classroom-level learning, thus impeding their adoption. We present an augmented reality based tabletop system with interface elements made of paper that addresses these issues. It integrates conventional geometry tools seamlessly into the activity and it enables group and classroom-level learning. In order to evaluate our system, we conducted an exploratory user study based on three learning activities: classifying quadrilaterals, discovering the protractor and describing angles. We observed how paper interfaces can be easily adopted into the traditional classroom practices.

In this paper we draw a community landscape of European Commission-funded TEL projects and organizations in the 6th and 7th Framework Programmes and

e

Content

plus

. The project metadata were crawled from the web and maintained as part of the TEL Mediabase, a large collection of data obtained from different web sources including blogs, bibliographies, and project fact sheets. We apply social network analysis and impact analysis on the project consortium progression graph and on the organizational collaboration graph to identify the most central TEL projects and organizations. The key findings are that networks of excellence and integrated projects have the strongest impact on the project network; that

e

Content

plus

was a funding bridge between FP6 and FP7; and that the tightly knit collaboration network may inhibit the assimilation of new organizations and ideas into the TEL community.

Orchestration refers to the real-time classroom management of multiple activities and multiple constraints conducted by teachers. Orchestration emphasizes the classroom constraints, integrative scenarios, and the role of teachers in managing these technology-enhanced classrooms. Supporting orchestration is becoming increasingly important due to the many factors and activities involved in the classroom. This paper presents the design and evaluation of TinkerLamp 2.0, a tangible tabletop learning environment that was explicitly designed to support classroom orchestration. Our study suggested that supporting orchestration facilitates teachers’ work and leads to improvements in both the classroom atmosphere and learning outcomes.

This paper discusses the notion of digital competence and its components. It reports on the identification, selection, and analyses of fifteen frameworks for the development of digital competence. Its objective is to understand how digital competence is currently understood and implemented. It develops an overview of the different sub-competences that are currently taken into account and builds a proposal for a common understanding of digital competence.

There is an implicit assumption in learning research that students learn more deeply in complex social and technological environments. Deep learning, in turn, is associated with higher degrees of students’ self-efficacy and transfer of learning. The present meta-analysis tested this assumption. Based on social cognitive theory, results suggested positive population correlation estimates between post-training self-efficacy and transfer. Results also showed that effect sizes were higher in trainings with rather than without computer support, and higher in trainings without rather than with collaboration. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of complex social and computer-mediated learning environments and their practical significance for scaffolding technology-enhanced learning and interaction.

In many lectures students use different mobile devices, like notebooks or smartphones. But the lecturers often do not know to what extent students use these devices for lecture-related self-regulated learning strategies, like writing notes or browsing for additional information. Unfortunately mobile devices also bear a potential for distraction. This article shows the results of observational study in five standard lectures in different disciplines and compares it to students’ responses on computer use in lectures. The results indicate a substantial divergence between students’ subjective stances on how they use mobile devices for learning in lectures and the actual observed, often lecture-unrelated behavior.

Orchestrating learning is a quite complex task. In fact, it has been identified as one of the grand challenges in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) by the Stellar Network of Excellence. The objective of this article is to provide teachers and students with a tool to help them in their effort of orchestrating learning, that makes use of awareness artefacts. Using this powerful mechanism in lab sessions, we propose four different aspects of orchestration as the target for improvement: the

management

of the resources in the learning environment; the

interventions

of the teacher and provision of formative feedback; the collection of evidences for summative

assessment

; and the

re-design

of the activity, adjusting some parameters for future enactments. The proposal has been tested in a real course of Multimedia Applications with junior students (3rd course), measuring the benefits for the orchestration.

The digital backchannel Backstage aims at supporting active and socially enriched participation in large class lectures by improving the social awareness of both lecturer and students. For this purpose, Backstage provides microblog-based communication for fast information exchange among students as well as from audience to lecturer. Rating enables students to assess relevance of backchannel messages for the lecture. Upon rating a ranking of messages can be determined and immediately presented to the lecturer. However, relevance is of temporal nature. Thus, the relevance of a message should degrade over time, a process called aging. Several aging approaches can be found in the literature. Many of them, however, rely on the physical time which only plays a minor role in assessing relevance in lecture settings. Rather, the actuality of relevance should depend on the progress of a lecture and on backchannel activity. Besides, many approaches are quite difficult in terms of comprehensibility, interpretation and handling. In this article we propose an approach to aging that is easy to understand and to handle and therefore more appropriate in the setting considered.

Adaptation and personalization of e-learning and technology-enhanced learning (TEL) systems in general, have become a tremendous key factor for the learning success with such systems. In order to provide adaptation, the system needs to have access to relevant data about the learner. This paper describes a preliminary study with the goal to infer a learner’s learning style from her Twitter stream. We selected the Felder-Silverman Learning Style Model (FSLSM) due to its validity and widespread use and collected ground truth data from 51 study participants based on self-reports on the Index of Learning Style questionnaire and tweets posted on Twitter. We extracted 29 features from each subject’s Twitter stream and used them to classify each subject as belonging to one of the two poles for each of the four dimensions of the FSLSM. We found a more than by chance agreement only for a single dimension: active/reflective. Further implications and an outlook are presented.

A large number of educational resources is now available on the Web to support both regular classroom learning and online learning. However, the abundance of available content produces at least two problems: how to help students find the most appropriate resources, and how to engage them into using these resources and benefiting from them. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential methods for addressing these problems. Our work presented in this paper attempts to combine the ideas of personalized and social learning. We introduce Progressor

 + 

, an innovative Web-based interface that helps students find the most relevant resources in a large collection of self-assessment questions and programming examples. We also present the results of a classroom study of the Progressor

 + 

in an undergraduate class. The data revealed the motivational impact of the personalized social guidance provided by the system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more educational resources and motivated them to do some work ahead of the course schedule. The increase in diversity of explored content resulted in improving students’ problem solving success. A deeper analysis of the social guidance mechanism revealed that it is based on the leading behavior of the strong students, who discovered the most relevant resources and created trails for weaker students to follow. The study results also demonstrate that students were more engaged with the system: they spent more time in working with self-assessment questions and annotated examples, attempted more questions, and achieved higher success rates in answering them.

The objective of this work is to propose a system, which generates learning scenarios for serious games keeping into account the learners’ profiles, pedagogical objectives and interaction traces. We present the architecture of this system and the scenario generation process. The proposed architecture should be, insofar as possible, independent of an application domain, i.e. the system should be suitable for different domains and different serious games. That is why we identified and separated different types of knowledge (domain concepts, pedagogical resources and serious game resources) in a multi-layer architecture. We also present the evaluation protocol used to validate the system, in particular the method used to generate a learning scenario and the knowledge models associated with the generation process. This protocol is based on comparative method that compares the scenario generated by our system with that of the expert. The results of this evaluation, conducted with a domain expert, are also presented.

Organizations increasingly recognize the potentials and needs of supporting and guiding the substantial individual and collaborative learning efforts made in the work place. Many interventions have been made into leveraging resources for organizational learning, ultimately aimed at improving effectiveness, innovation and productivity of knowledge work in organizations. However, information is scarce on the effects of such interventions. This paper presents the results of a multiple-case study consisting of seven cases investigating measures organizations have taken in order to spark effects considered beneficial in leveraging resources for organizational learning. We collected a number of reasons why organizations deem themselves as outperforming others in leveraging individual, collaborative and organizational learning, measures that are perceived as successful as well as richly described relationships between those levers and seven selected effects that these measures have caused.

In this paper we reflect on the limitations of applying traditional requirements engineering approaches to the development of a large-scale PLE infrastructure, which is precisely the aim of a technology-enhanced learning project called ROLE. The Social Requirements Engineering (SRE) approach has been proposed as an appropriate alternative. The SRE process is grounded in an agent- and goal-oriented conceptual model. The implementation of SRE prototypes was structured with a five-staged requirement lifecycle: elicitation, negotiation, selection, development and feedback. We report results of the preliminary evaluation of the prototypes and lessons learnt. Several relevant issues have been identified, including the lack of a consensual understanding of key concepts, lurking within Community of Practices (CoP), and cultural differences. Possible solutions are proposed to address the issues, including templates, mandatory voting and prioritisation model.

Serious games rely on two main types of competence and expertise: the game designer’s and the teacher’s. One of the main problems in creating a serious game that is both amusing and educational, and efficiently so, is building a cooperative environment allowing both types of experts to understand each other and communicate with a common language. The aim of this paper is to create such a language using Design Patterns based on our framework: the Six Facets of Serious Game Design. If many design patterns already exist for the game design aspects, they are in short supply on the pedagogical side.

Erroneous examples are an instructional technique that hold promise to help children learn. In the study reported in this paper, sixth and seventh grade math students were presented with erroneous examples of decimal problems and were asked to explain and correct those examples. The problems were presented as interactive exercises on the Internet, with feedback provided on correctness of the student explanations and corrections. A second (control) group of students were given problems to solve, also with feedback on correctness. With over 100 students per condition, an erroneous example effect was found: students who worked with the interactive erroneous examples did significantly better than the problem solving students on a delayed posttest. While this finding is highly encouraging, our ultimate research question is this: how can erroneous examples be

adaptively

presented to students, targeted at their most deeply held misconceptions, to best leverage their effectiveness? This paper discusses how the results of the present study will lead us to an adaptive version of the erroneous examples material.

Digital educational games, especially those equipped with adaptive features for reacting to individual characteristics of players, require heterogeneous teams. This increases costs incurred by coordination and communication overhead. Simultaneously, typical educational games have smaller budgets than normal entertainment games. In order to address this challenge, we present an overview of game development processes and map these processes into a concept for an authoring tool that unifies the different workflows and facilitates close collaboration in development teams. Using the tool, authors can create the structure of a game and fill it with content without relying on game programmers. For adding adaptivity to the game, the authoring tool features specific user support measures that assist the authors in the relatively novel field of creating non-linear, adaptive educational experiences. Evaluations with users recruited from actual user groups involved in game development shows the applicability of this process.

In this paper, we propose the dashboards of the Pco-Vision platform to support and enhance Project-Based Learning (PBL). Based on the assumption that Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) is a major component of PBL, we have focused our attention in the design of a dashboard to enhance SRL in PBL. We describe the characteristics of PBL and show why a dashboard can help involved SRL processes, more particularly self-monitoring and self-judgment. We provide a categorization of the information to be presented on dashboards to help students involved in a PBL situation; by taking into account both the project and the learning goals. Finally we have conducted an experiment using the Pco-Vision platform with 64 students involved in a 6-months PBL course; results show that, whereas students rather use direct communication for tasks related to the self-monitoring process, the dashboard appears to be of great importance to enhance the self-judgment process, especially by presenting the information about the way of carrying out the activities.

In CSCL, going from teachers´ abstract learning design ideas to their deployment in VLEs through the life-cycle of CSCL scripts, typically implies a loss of information. It is relevant for TEL and learning design fields to assess to what extent this loss affects the pedagogical essence of the original idea. This paper presents a study wherein 37 teachers’ collaborative learning designs were deployed in Moodle with the support of a particular set of ICT tools throughout the different phases of CSCL scripts life-cycle. According to the data from the study, teachers considered that the resulting deployment of learning designs in Moodle was still valid to be used in real practice (even though some information is actually lost). This promising result provides initial evidence that may impulse further research efforts aimed at the ICT support of learning design practices in the technological context dominated by mainstream VLEs.

In work-integrated learning, individual, collaborative and organisational learning are deeply intertwined and overlapping. In this paper, we examine the role of reflection as a learning mechanism that enable and facilitates transitions between these levels. The paper aims at informing technological support for learning in organisations that focuses on these transitions. Based on a theoretical background covering reflection as a learning mechanism at work as well as the abovementioned transitions, and on observations in two organisations (IT consulting, emergency care hospital unit), we argue that such technological support needs to implement two inherently different, yet complementary mechanisms: push and pull. “Push” subsumes procedures in which reflection outcomes transcend individual and collective ownership towards the organisation through efforts made by the reflection participants. “Pull” subsumes situations in which the effort of managing the uptake of results from reflection is shifted away from the reflection participants to third parties in the organisation. We illustrate each mechanism with an application built to support it.

In the past, eAssessment focused on increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of test administration; improving the validity and reliability of test scores; and making a greater range of test formats susceptible to automatic scoring. Despite the variety of computer-enhanced test formats, eAssessment strategies have been firmly grounded in a traditional paradigm, based on the explicit testing of knowledge. There is a growing awareness that this approach is less suited to capturing “Key Competences” and “21

st

century skills”. Based on a review of the literature, this paper argues that, though there are still technological challenges, the more pressing task is to transcend the testing paradigm and conceptually develop (e)Assessment strategies that foster the development of 21

st

century skills.

Several educational organizations provide Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tool registries to support educators when selecting ICT tools for their classrooms. A common problem is how to populate these registries with descriptions of ICT tools that can be useful for education. This paper proposes to tackle it taking advantage of the information already published in the Web of Data, following a Linked-Data approach. For this purpose, SEEK-AT-WD is proposed as an infrastructure that automatically retrieves ICT tool descriptions from the Web and publishes them back once they are related to an educational vocabulary. A working prototype containing 3556 descriptions of ICT tools is presented. These descriptions can be accessed either from a web interface or through a search client that has also been developed. The potential of the proposal is discussed by means of a feature analysis involving educators, data publishers and registry administrators. Results show that it is much easier to update the data associated to SEEK-AT-WD in comparison to other approaches, while educators obtain from a single registry thousands of tool descriptions collected from the Web.

Analogous to keywords describing the important and relevant content of a document we extract key actions from learners’ usage data assuming that they represent important and relevant parts of their learning behaviour. These key actions enable the teachers to better understand the dynamics in their classes and the problems that occur while learning. Based on these insights, teachers can intervene directly as well as improve the quality of their learning material and learning design. We test our approach on usage data collected in a large introductory C programming course at a university and discuss the results based on the feedback of the teachers.

This paper investigates how local and global self-evaluations of capabilities can be used to predict pupils’ problem-solving behaviour in the domain of fraction learning. To answer this question we analyzed logfiles of pupils who worked on multi-trial fraction tasks. Logistic regression analyses revealed that local confidence judgements assessed online improve the prediction of post-error solving, as well as skipping behaviour significantly, while pre-assessed global perception of competence failed to do so. Yet, for all computed models, the impact of our prediction is rather small. Further research is necessary to enrich these models with other relevant user- as well as task-characteristics to make them usable for adaptation.

Modern learning models require linking experiences in training environments with experiences in the real-world. However, data about real-world experiences is notoriously hard to collect. Social spaces bring new opportunities to tackle this challenge, supplying digital traces where people talk about their real-world experiences. These traces can become valuable resource, especially in ill-defined domains that embed multiple interpretations. The paper presents a unique approach to aggregate content from social spaces into a semantic-enriched data browser to facilitate informal learning in ill-defined domains. This work pioneers a new way to exploit digital traces about real-world experiences as authentic examples in informal learning contexts. An exploratory study is used to determine both strengths and areas needing attention. The results suggest that semantics can be successfully used in social spaces for informal learning – especially when combined with carefully designed nudges.

This paper analyses the relationship between the experience of using different ICT and attitudes towards e-learning. We have conducted two surveys with teachers and students from the academic institutions associated with the subject of electricity in Turkey. Both surveys have been built on our conceptual models of readiness for e-learning. 280 and 483 valid responses from teachers and students have been collected, respectively. Overall, the findings indicate that the more experiences the teachers and students have of using different ICT the more positive their attitudes towards e-learning and that e-learning should be integrated into campus-based education and training.

This paper presents a case study of the usage of GLUE!, a loosely-coupled architecture that enables the integration of external tools in VLEs. The case study is a collaborative learning situation carried out through a VLE, but involving several external tools. GLUE! is used to instantiate and enact this situation in two authentic experiments. Evaluation results show that GLUE! alleviated educators in the instantiation process, and facilitated the effective collaboration among students. These results are relevant as this is a real situation with a complex structure and groups that change over time.

Awareness of own and of other people’s mood are prerequisite to a reflective learning process which allows people to consciously change their perception of, attitude towards and behaviour in future work situations. In this paper we investigate the usage and usefulness of the MoodMap App – an application for tracking own mood and creating awareness about the mood of team members in virtual meetings. Our study shows that especially the possibility to compare own mood to the mood of others’ is perceived as useful and therefore enhances interpersonal communication in virtual team settings. Whilst users express an interest in tracking own mood, they need to relate their mood to the current context, and wish to receive feedback or other helpful input from the app in order to achieve propitious reflective learning.

We are developing

Ask-Elle

, a programming tutor that supports students practising functional programming exercises in Haskell.

Ask-Elle

supports the stepwise construction of a program, can give hints and worked-out solutions at any time, and can check whether or not a student is developing a program similar to one of the model solutions for a problem. An important goal of

Ask-Elle

is to allow as much flexibility as possible for both teachers and students. A teacher can specify her own exercises by giving a set of model solutions for a problem. Based on these model solutions our tutor generates feedback. A teacher can adapt feedback by annotating model solutions. A student may use her own names for functions and variables, and may use different, but equivalent, language constructs. This paper shows how we track intermediate student steps in

Ask-Elle

and how we avoid the state space explosion we get when analysing intermediate, incomplete, student answers.

Learner’s self-awareness of the breadth and depth of their expertise is crucial for self-regulated learning. Further, of learners report self-knowledge assessments to teaching systems, this can be used to adapt teaching to them. These reasons make it valuable to enable learners to quickly and easily create such models and to improve them. Following the trend to open these models to learners, we present an interface for interactive open learner modeling using expertise predictions so that these assist learners in reflecting on their self-knowledge while building their models. We report study results showing that predictions (1) increase the size of learner models significantly, (2) lead to a larger spread in self-assessments and (3) influence learners’ motivation positively.

A characteristic of informal learning is that a person has an unsolved issue and starts searching for answers. To what extent can we transfer such a ’motivation to learn’ into formal education? In 2002, an online, open, free forum at a university has been launched for around 2,000 students at a study program (CS). Users got the opportunity to co-construct new knowledge about issues what they want (e.g., course content, how to study successfully). Designed in that way, the online forum provides an informal learning space. Studying it from a sociological theory of social roles, one conclusion is that the iForum activates the conative level of learning. The term conation by K. Kolbe in 1990 refers to a concrete action; the learner does not only know, s/he really acts, s/he is willing to do sth. This rubric of learning is neglected in

designs for

formal schooling where cognitive learning ‘textbook knowledge’ is more focused.

Competence-annotations assist learners to retrieve and better understand the level of skills required to comprehend learning objects. However, the process of annotating learning objects with competence levels is a very time consuming task; ideally, this task should be performed by experts on the subjects of the educational resources. Due to this, most educational resources available online do not enclose competence information. In this paper, we present a method to tackle the problem of automatically assigning an educational resource with competence topics. To solve this problem, we exploit information extracted from external repositories available on the Web, which lead us to a domain independent approach. Results show that automatically assigned competences are coherent and may be applied to automatically enhance learning objects metadata.

The World Wide Web (WWW) provides access to a vast array of digital content, a great deal of which could be ideal for incorporation into eLearning environments. However, reusing such content directly in its native form has proven to be inadequate, and manually customizing it for eLearning purposes is labor-intensive. This paper introduces Slicepedia, a service which enables the discovery, reuse and customization of open corpus resources, as educational content, in order to facilitate its incorporation into eLearning systems. An architecture and implementation of the system is presented along with a preliminary user-trial evaluation suggesting the process of slicing open corpus content correctly decontextualises it from its original context of usage and can provide a valid automated alternative to manually produced educational resources.

For solving many of today’s complex problems, professionals need to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams. Facilitation of knowledge awareness and coordination among group members, that is through a Transactive Memory System (TMS), is vital in multidisciplinary collaborative settings. Online platforms such as ICT tools or Computer-supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) have the potential to facilitate multidisciplinary learning. This study investigates the extent to which establishment of various dimensions of TMS (specialization, coordination, credibility) is facilitated using a computer-supported collaboration script, i.e. a transactive memory script. In addition, we examine the effects of this script on individual learning satisfaction, experience, and performance. A pre-test, post-test design was used with 56 learners who were divided into pairs based on disciplinary background and randomly divided into treatment condition or control group. They were asked to analyse, discuss, and solve an authentic problem case related to their domains. Based on the findings, we conclude that a transactive memory script in the form of prompts facilitates construction of a TMS and also improves learners’ satisfaction with learning experience, and performance. We provide explanations and implications for these results.

Mobile learning games have increasingly been topic of educational research with the intention to utilize their manifold and ubiquitous capabilities for learning and teaching. This paper presents a review of current research activities in the field. It particularly focuses is on the educational values serious mobile games provide. The study results substantiate their generally assumed motivational potential. Also, they indicate that mobile learning games may have the potential to bring about cognitive learning outcomes.

Teacher and students can use WWW as a limitless source of learning material for nearly any subject. Yet, such abundance of content comes with the problem of finding the right piece at the right time. Conventional adaptive educational systems cannot support personalized access to open-corpus learning material as they rely on manually constructed content models. This paper presents an approach to this problem that does not require intervention from a human expert. The approach has been implemented in an adaptive system that recommends students supplementary reading material and adaptively annotates it. The results of the evaluation experiment have demonstrated several significant effects of using the system on students’ learning.

We propose a method for creating different types of study groups with aim to support effective collaboration during learning. We concentrate on the small groups which solve short-term well-defined problems. The method is able to apply many types of students’ characteristics as inputs, e.g. interests, knowledge, but also their collaborative characteristics. It is based on the Group Technology approach. Students in the created groups are able to communicate and collaborate with the help of several collaborative tools in a collaborative platform called PopCorm which allows us to automatically observe dynamic aspects of the created groups. The results of these observations provide a feedback to the method for creating groups. In the long term experiment groups created by our method achieved significantly better results in the comparison with the reference method (k-means clustering).

Mixed Reality Learning Games (MRLG) provide new perspectives in learning. But obviously, MRLG are harder to design than traditional learning games environments. The main complexity is to cope with all the difficulties of learning design, game design and mixed reality design at the same time, and with the integration of all aspects in a coherent way. In this paper, we present existing tools and methods to design learning games or mixed reality environments. Then, we propose a model of MRLG design process. In the last part, we present an authoring tool, MIRLEGADEE, and how it supports this process.

A new method for evaluating assignments on constructions in geometry is proposed. Instead of comparing drawn objects and their parameters, a process of construction is evaluated as a procedure of getting from the given input to the required output. The method was implemented and used by approximately 10 teachers and 300 students of secondary schools with positive results.

In this demonstration we will introduce

Ask-Elle

, a Haskell tutor.

Ask-Elle

supports the incremental development of Haskell programs. It can give hints on how to proceed with solving a programming exercise, and feedback on incomplete student programs. We will show

Ask-Elle

in action, and discuss how a teacher can configure its behaviour.

Students and lecturers use computers in lectures. But, the standard tools give a rather insufficient structure and support for better learning results. Backstage is an adjustable backchannel environment where students can communicate by microblogs, which they can link to the presenter slides. The lecturer can get feedback by Backstage and place quizzes with an Audience Response System. Backstage is designed to facilitate specific sequences of learning activities and to enhance student motivation with different functions, like asking questions anonymously via microblogs or to rate other students’ questions.

The main objective of this paper is to illustrate the instantiation and enactment of a collaborative learning situation that requires the integration of three external tools, in two different VLEs (Moodle and LAMS), with GLUE!. GLUE! facilitates the instantiation of collaborative activities, reducing the time and effort educators need for the creation, configuration and assignment of external tool instances for each group. In particular, this paper details how GLUE! allows for each VLE to use its own group management routines with external tools, in the same seamless way as done with built-in tools. The GLUE! web site complements this paper, showing videos of these and other integrations.

The paper presents the “Energy Awareness Displays” project that makes hidden energy consumption data visible and accessible for people working in office buildings. Besides raising awareness on the topic and introducing relevant conservation strategies, the main goal is to provide dynamic situated feedback when taking individual consumption actions at the workplace. Therefore a supporting infrastructure as well as two example applications to access and explore the consumption information have been implemented and evaluated. The paper presents and discusses the approach, the developed infrastructure and applications, as well as the evaluation results.

The growth of Web 2.0 and the effective technological convergence of mobile devices, social networks and blogs increased the potential for collective work of global nomads in digital environments. In modern digital society, nomadism changes significantly the way that users, relate, organize themselves and communicate in many different digital environments. With respect to technology-enhanced learning, the consequences of this state of affairs are that students are much more comfortable using their own social tools, and thus are not happy to spend time and effort using particular virtual learning environment (VLE). Thus, one way of keeping students motivated and exploiting their online time is to take advantage of the social tools they already use. In this direction, this article presents i-collaboration 3.0, a system that aims to create distributed and personalized virtual learning spaces on web-based tools (e.g. Twitter, Facebook). The system supports learning in distributed environments that students already know and considers their needs and preferences to provide contents.

This demonstration will highlight the pedagogy and functionality of the Metafora system as developed by the end of the second year of the EU-funded (ICT-257872) project. The Metafora system expands the teaching focus beyond domain-specific learning to enable the development of 21st century collaborative competencies necessary to learn in today’s complex, fast-paced environment. These competencies — termed collectively as “Learning to Learn together” (L2L2) — include: distributed leadership, planning / organizing the learning process, mutual engagement, seeking and providing help amongst peers, and reflection on the learning process. We summarise here the Metafora system, its learning innovation and our plan for the demonstration and interaction session during which participants will be introduced to L2L2 and Metafora through hands-on experience.

There exist few virtual learning environments (VLEs) which allow teachers to make learning design decisions explicit and reusable in other environments. Sadly, those few VLEs that do so, are not available to most teachers, due to institutional decisions and other contextual constraints. This panorama is even grimmer if a teacher wants to use not only the tools offered by the institutional VLE, but also other web 2.0 tools (in a broader, so-called ”Distributed Learning Environment”). By using the GLUE!-PS architecture and data model, teachers are now able to design learning activities using a variety of learning design tools, and to deploy them automatically in several different distributed learning environments. The demonstrator will show two authentic learning designs with different pedagogical approaches, and how GLUE!-PS helps set up the ICT infrastructure for both of them into two different distributed learning environments (one based on Moodle, the other on wikis).

Math-Bridge is an e-Learning platform for online courses in mathematics. It has a number of unique features: it provides access to the largest in the World collection of multilingual, semantically annotated mathematical learning objects; it models students’ knowledge and applies several adaptation techniques to support more effective learning, including personalized course generation, intelligent problem solving support and adaptive link annotation; it facilities a direct access to learning objects by means of semantic and multilingual search. All this student interface functionality is complemented by the teacher interface that allows managing students, groups and courses, as well as tracing students’ progress with the reporting tool. Overall, Math-Bridge offers a complete solution for organizing technology-enhanced learning of mathematics on individual-, course- and/or university level.

The expected large-scale introduction of electric vehicles creates a need for up-to-date and just-in-time available learning materials and tools. In this paper we demonstrate how a set of web-based and mobile learning and collaboration services support situated learning for e-Mobility and similar domains. The approach is currently developed within the MEMO project.

In this research, we introduce a new web-based solution that enables the transfer of the widely established Peer Instruction method to lectures with far more than 100 participants. The proposed solution avoids several existing flaws that hinder the widespread adoption of PI in lectures with larger groups. We test our new solution in a series of lectures with more than 500 participants and evaluate our prototype using the technology acceptance model. The evaluation results as well as qualitative feedback of course participants indicate that our new solution is a useful artifact to transfer the PI method to large groups.

Proportional reasoning is a broadly applicable skill that is fundamental to mathematical understanding. While the cognitive development of proportional reasoning is well understood, traditional learning methods are often ineffective. They provide neither real-time feedback nor sophisticated tools to scaffold learning. Learners often cannot connect embodied notions (this glass is half full) to their symbolic representations (

$\frac{1}{2}$

). In this paper, we introduce Proportion—a tablet applications for two co-located learners to work together to solve a series of increasingly difficult ratio / proportion problems. We motivate the work in previous research on proportional reasoning, detail the design and outline the questions this design-based research aims to address.

This paper describes prototype tools to support goal formation and sharing to assist knowledge workers in participating and managing their participation in learning networks. We describe the concept of Charting as the process whereby an individual monitors and optimises their interaction with the people and resources who contribute to their learning and development and how tools to support learning goal articulation and sharing can provide an integrative function for a Personal Learning Environment. The paper then describes the development of prototype tools which support goal articulation and sharing and discusses how such tools might integrate with existing learning and development practices, concluding with some questions for further research.

SEEK-AT-WD is an open Linked Data-based registry of educational tools that crawls the Web of Data to obtain tool metadata, thus significantly reducing the overall effort of data generation and maintenance. Since SEEK-AT-WD is an infrastructure, there is a need of end-user applications that can consume these data and provide additional value to the educational domain. In this regard, we present here U-Seek, an interactive searcher of educational tools that uses SEEK-AT-WD as the back end. U-Seek has been specially designed for educators, supporting the formulation of semantic searches by multiple criteria through a direct manipulation graphical user interface. Traditional keyword-based searches are also supported and can be combined with aforementioned semantic searches, thus resulting in enhanced flexibility and response accuracy.

This demo paper illustrates content adaptation for mobile devices. Adaptation considers the context of the client and also the environment, where the client request is received. A device independent model is demonstrated in order to achieve automatic adaptation of a content based on its semantic and the capabilities of the target device. A Web Services-based Framework is presented for adapting, displaying and manipulating learning objects on small handheld devices. A speech solution allows learners to turn written text into natural speech files, in using standard voices. This demo paper also illustrates the main features of XESOP system: authoring of heterogeneous data, integration by means of Web services’ invocation in a Learning Course Management System.

Computer science is a collaborative effort, as evidenced by the proliferation of open source software and code-collaboration websites. Computer science education should introduce students to programming in an environment where collaboration is encouraged. We prototyped an integrated development environment (IDE) with connectivity to a remote database to encourage students to engage in what Etienne Wenger calls a “community of practice” [1]. This approach is based on insights from Monroy-Hernández’ work on remixing in Scratch [2] with needs identified from a range of existing open source community models [3,4,5].

Students use Facebook to organize their classroom experiences [1], but hardly to share and form opinions on subject matters. We explore the benefits of argument diagrams for the formation of scientific opinion on behaviorism in Facebook. We aim at raising awareness of opinion conflict and structuring the argumentation with scripts [2]. A lab study with University students (ten dyads per condition) compared the influence of argument structuring (students built individual argument diagrams before discussing in Facebook) vs. no argument structuring (only Facebook discussion) on opinion formation, measured through opinion change. The argumentation script was implemented in the web-based system LASAD to support sound argumentation [3].

Game-based approaches to learning are increasingly being recognized as having the potential to stimulate intrinsic motivation amongst learners. Whilst a range of examples of effective serious games exist, creating the high-fidelity content with which to populate a serious game is resource-intensive task. To reduce this resource requirement, research is increasingly exploring means to reuse and repurpose existing games and relevant sources of content. Education has proven a popular application area for Adaptive Hypermedia, as adaptation can offer enriched learning experiences to students. Whilst content to-date has mainly been in the form of rich text, various efforts have been made to integrate Serious Games into Adaptive Hypermedia via run-time adaptation engines. However, there is little in the way of effective integrated authoring and user modeling support for these efforts. This paper explores avenues for effectively integrating serious games into adaptive hypermedia. In particular, we consider authoring and user modeling aspects in addition to integration into run-time adaptation engines, thereby enabling authors to create Adaptive Hypermedia that includes an adaptive game, thus going beyond mere selection of a suitable game and towards an approach with the capability to adapt and respond to the needs of learners and educators.

We discuss the similarities and differences between the Co-evolution Model of Cognitive and Social Knowledge and Sociofact Theory as two new theories of collaborative learning and knowledge maturing.

This study examines challenges that are inherent in computer supported intercultural collaborative learning (CSICL) in higher education. For this purpose, a 22-item survey was completed by students (N=98) who worked collaboratively in culturally diverse pairs on an online learning task focused on the field of life sciences. Students were required to rate on a Likert scale the importance of a certain challenge in CSICL. Descriptive statistics were used to determine what challenges are perceived to be the most important by students in CSICL. The results suggest that ‘a collaborative partner is not communicating properly’, ‘a low level of motivation’ and ‘insufficient English language skills’ were perceived by all study participants to be the most important challenges in CSICL.

The aim of this project is to design, implement and analyze the use of a personal ubiquitous learning environment in order to develop a prototype that can be commercially exploited. Initial results have shown specific requirements in terms of personalization, integration of different environments, tools and resources and features to structure and plan the knowledge.

In the context of the professional training of operators of Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) on Full-Scope Simulators (FSS), the objective of our work is to propose models and tools to help trainers observe and analyze trainees’ activities during preparation and debriefing. For that purpose, our approach consists in representing the actions of the operators and the simulation data in the form of modeled trace. These modeled traces are then transformed in order to extract higher information level. Trainers can visualized the different levels of trace to analyze the reasons, collective or individual, of successes or failure of trainees during the simulation.

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) seem, in theory, an excellent way to integrate the various component systems used in an e-Learning platform.

Why are they not used more broadly?

I suspect the main reason is that using a multi-agent architecture requires solving many issues from the beginning that can be ignored at the prototype stage in other approaches, like fine-grained security and fault tolerance.

To solve that I am developing the e-Learning Multi-Agent System (eLMAS) that will be used as integration platform in the European project Allegro.

In eLMAS there are two kinds of agents: “liaison” agents that connect existing e-Learning systems to the MAS, and learner agents that represent the user, storing the learner model and planning the learning activities.

We present a research on students’ learning styles and their learning activity with respect to multimedia learning resources in a virtual learning environment within a Moodle online course. We investigate the relation between learning styles based on sensory modality and their learning activity regarding different types of multimedia resources.

VARK is a sensory model developed by Neil Fleming. It is an acronym for Visual (V), Aural (A), Read/Write (R), and Kinesthetic (K).

Considering the VARK questionnaire results, we came to a conclusion that two out of three students have multimodal learning styles and prefer combining different types of resources. The most used type of resource is pictorial accompanied by text (72%). Considering log file data analysis it is shown that students with higher visual learning style scores obtained by the VARK questionnaire have lower tendency of accessing pictorial resources accompanied by text. Furthermore, at the end of each lesson we conducted a survey allowing multiple answers asking students what type of resources they have been using.

Results show that the usage of video resources is highly correlated with the access to the same resources. Correspondingly the usage of textual resources is highly correlated with the access to the same resources. Moreover, a negative correlation exists between the usage of pictorial resources and the access to textual resources, meaning that the students who preferred pictorial resources accompanied by text, accessed to textual resources less.

However, the usage of pictorial resources accompanied by text has low correlation with the access to those resources. Considering this fact, it could be possible that students spent more time studying the pictorial resources accompanied by text, therefore accessing those resources less.

Based on diagnostic performance and eye tracking data, the present study demonstrates that technology-enhanced replays of expert gaze can promote the visual learning of students in clinical visualization-based training.

Many recent studies have shown that educational games are effective tools for learning [1]. Despite the recent popularity of game-based learning and some first general guidelines for the creation of such educational games [2], there is a lack of useful practical guidelines for specific game types that address all relevant aspects of design, implementation and testing. This might be explained with the possible lack of experience of instructional designers with computer games and game designers with education [3], but it influences the focus and the approach chosen for the game design and implementation process. The goal of our work is to develop guidelines for the creation of educational adventure games that help not to forget any aspect. In order to do so, we refer to both existing guidelines for the design of entertainment games and existing frameworks for the design of educational games. We suggest a structure of five main game development phases (conceptual design and game design, implementation, testing and validation) and also take project management into account, to not only guide through the creation of the game itself but also to support the organization of the game development process [4]. Our next steps are to put the EAGC guidelines into practice and to show their applicability in a concrete example project, an educational adventure game on electricity, which is currently under development.