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Serious games have a great potential to help people developing new skills or improving previously existing ones. Deaf and blind community face considerable challenges and difficulties regarding to the acquisition of skills in literacy. The design of serious games to meet the needs of the target groups where the deaf and blind people are struggling to master literacy would therefore seem to offer a very considerable contribution. With this project, not only we are promoting the knowledge for this restricted community, but we are also encouraging other people to learn and become able to better understand this communities. Therefore, this article aims to discuss the use of serious games for deaf and blind people, as well as illustrate the development methodology of inclusive serious games by presenting specific concepts for each target audience. We have used the cognitive model proposed by Mayer (2005) to describe some fundamental principles behind multimedia learning, defined from his theory and based on the evidences that are essential for the elaboration of serious games for deaf and blind people. We hope that the games developed, and guidelines provided will help game designers to achieve successful implementation in inclusive games. [For the full proceedings, see ED621557.]

Producing quality digital educational content is the goal of any teaching/learning system, including the teaching/learning technologies contexts. This paper introduces how the Quantitative Evaluation Framework may be used to accurately evaluate the digital content produced throughout the development process of an inclusive and integrative MOOC in Educational Technologies, based on a Postgraduate Degree from Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (School of Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of Porto). The model is sustained in the SCORM standards, adopting the ISO 9126 standard as a reference, and it proposes a quantitative representation in an orthogonal three-dimensional environment: pedagogical, ergonomics, and management. Each of these domains comprises a set of factors for which it is quite relevant to determine the degree of the system's performance. The factor is a component that represents the performance degree of the digital content in the system, following a predetermined quality criterion. The measurement of the quality of the educational digital contents is assured by quantitative methods, similar to the evaluation techniques commonly used in the education system, which makes its application simpler. [For the complete proceedings, see ED590269.]

Promoted by the significant increase of large scale internet access, many audiences have turned to the web and to its resources for learning and inspiration, with diverse sets of skills and intents. In this context, Multimedia Online Open Courses (MOOC) consist in learning models supported on user-friendly web tools that allow anyone with minimum computer literacy to get involved. Although this model is popular abroad, it is not commonly used in the Portuguese Higher Education scenario. Therefore, this paper presents a proposal for structuring in a MOOC an already validated set of post-graduation courses in the field of Information and Communication Technologies applied to education in Portuguese. This paper also aims to establish a threshold for perfect MOOC framing in higher education contexts. The Quantitative Evaluation Framework (QEF) approach was selected for this evaluation to highlight the strengths and limitations of the Post-graduations in Technologies and Computing Applied to Education. With this project we intend to contribute for promoting education professionals' personal training at distance, in a stimulating, interactive and flexible environment, giving access to knowledge to innumerable amount of professionals who might not have access to these courses with adjustable schedules, and real life validation (and accreditation). [For the complete proceedings, see ED579335.]

In this paper we present the overall evaluation of the Quantitative Evaluation Framework (QEF) approach which has been applied in an operational teaching environment for the last year. This environment includes the development of a serious game, supported by a web platform and extended to mobile platforms, which is being supervised by the research group GILT (Graphics, interaction &amp, learning technologies) under the frame of an international project. The serious game that has been developed is called "Time Mesh". Time Mesh is a funded quasi experimental educational software project which is being developed under the frame of a quality evaluation environment, Quantitative Evaluation Framework (QEF) (Escudeiro Paula and Bidarra José, 2006), that measures system quality throughout its development life cycle. The quality evaluation process started with a careful planning phase. It has included the purpose of the evaluation, the timing of the evaluation and who should be conducting the evaluation process. Moderating the development of "Time Mesh" with QEF assures the quality of the final product. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The use of Mobile Technologies opens new possibilities for the teaching and learning processes, taking us to a new reality, called Mobile Learning or m-Learning. The m-learning in this work is defined" as learning processes that occur, necessarily supported by the use of mobile technologies and that has mobility as a fundamental characteristic of human actors, who may be physically / geographically distant from other actors and also the physical spaces of formal education, such as classrooms, training rooms or the workplace" [1], [6]. It is author's intention to alert the academic community of the features in using M-Learning. We feel the need to develop of applications that use this type of technology, ensuring that education be accessible to all. The present work conducts a research of mobile learning as a tool to support education in higher Institutions. At same time, the authors of the present work investigated existing solutions, which have been using advanced mobile technologies to support learning process with emphasis in the use of mobile devices and they analyzed practical implications of design and education when they come into mobile virtual learning environments. A education software was developed to support the students in learning. To evaluate the system, we used the framework QEF (Quality Evaluation Framework) and we done a questionnaire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper presents a proposal high-level model for the development of Educational Collaborative virtual Environments based on engineering software and quality concepts for software development. A life cycle was identified, which was detailed the phases of development, taking into account different techniques and methods and related documentation. The main goal of this research is to demonstrate how we can use the model to develop our applications by virtual world's platforms. The model was conceived based on research carried out in area the development of models that integrate all phases of process development software and models for assessing collaborative virtual environments. The model used contains a set of diagrams to support developer teams in their tasks, mainly in the creation of educational collaborative virtual environments to be used in an e-learning context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]