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This paper presents findings on participants of a massive open online course named "Educational Robotics for all" developed under Open edX platform. The document describes the organization and structure of the MOOC and some of its preliminary results. As an example, Module 2 about Gender and STEAM is presented and discussed.

A didactic experience is presented focused to a group of secondary school to learn the main features of the topic of diode-based circuits. Students have followed the experience by means of a MOOC in which didactic activities and practices have been designed using the Cognitive Motor Model taxonomy. VISIR remote laboratory is the main technical resource to carry out practices.

Internet of Things (IoT) learning involves the acquisition of transversal skills ranging from the development based on IoT devices and sensors (edge computing) to the connection of the devices themselves to management environments that allow the storage and processing (cloud computing) of data generated by sensors. The usual development cycle for IoT applications consists of the following three stages: stage 1 corresponds to the description of the devices and basic interaction with sensors. In stage 2, data acquired by the devices/sensors are employed by communication models from the origin edge to the management middleware in the cloud. Finally, stage 3 focuses on processing and presentation models. These models present the most relevant indicators for IoT devices and sensors. Students must acquire all the necessary skills and abilities to understand and develop these types of applications, so lecturers need an infrastructure to enable the learning of development of full IoT applications. A Web of Things (WoT) platform named Labs of Things at UNED (LoT@UNED) has been used for this goal. This paper shows the fundamentals and features of this infrastructure, and how the different phases of the full development cycle of solutions in IoT environments are implemented using LoT@UNED. The proposed system has been tested in several computer science subjects. Students can perform remote experimentation with a collaborative WoT learning environment in the cloud, including the possibility to analyze the generated data by IoT sensors.

Short Description-The aim of this paper is to introduce the use of Arduino, an established tool in the development of applications and deployment of educational content, as of a course related to the introduction to robotics. Robotics requires several skills and competencies that can be easily developed with tools like Arduino. These skills and competencies are related to the areas of knowledge used for the development of robotic applications, such as computer science, electricity, electronics and mechanics. Throughout this paper we present Arduino, the resources used for the deployment of the course and the results obtained from the educational experiences carried out. The results of the educational robotics course demonstrate how children with previous experience in Scratch programming, skills and competencies with simple Crumble-based robots can continue the learning process through classroom experiences using Arduino. In this way, students can improve skills and competencies already worked with tools such as Scratch and Crumble. Another important observation from the results is that it is important to adapt the difficulty of the content to each child. Finally, it is important to combine theory and practice to include fun and intertwined tasks with the challenges of applying theory to problem solving.

This article describes the different Open Educational Resources included in several Vocational Education and Training qualifications designed by the authors. The aim of these courses is to foster European SMEs competitiveness through new technologies such as Cloud Computing, Internet of Things and Internet of Energy. The main resources included in the didactic courses designed are video lectures, interviews, showcases, webinars and demonstrators.

Robotics and computational thinking are valuable tools for developing science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) pedagogy, and to promote inclusion and integration of students. We currently have a multitude of robotic education tools at our disposal. These tools arise with the aim of promoting innovation and student motivation during the learning process. Robots are becoming more and more common in our society today. Therefore, it is important to integrate robots into all levels of our everyday life. This work is focused on presenting Raspberry Pi as enhancer of educational robotics. The first step is presenting robotics as a tool for promoting the inclusion and integration of students. For this work a background and overview is also provided. The third part proposed different setups to prepare a Raspberry Pi for remote activities and robotics using Arduino as hardware interface. The last but not the least is an open discussion with the aim of exchanging impressions and getting feedback from the attendees.

During the last few decades, many industrial remote and virtual laboratories have been designed and implemented at different universities and schools with the goal of providing online experiments that are remotely available to their students from anywhere and at any time. Research into virtual and remote laboratories has shown that the vast majority of these laboratories are built using learning tools and resources that are suited to a specific institution. Thus, different universities implement the software for their particular needs and consume a significant amount of time and energy in the process. This article describes a different approach: the design and implementation of a learning management system (LMS) activity that allows sharing of electronic, control and automation, and electrical remote laboratories from different universities within industrial courses without requiring the teacher to program a single line of code.

This research describes the method of combining traditional authentication (password and username) with biometric technology, specifically fingerprint authentication. This authentication model is applied in distance education where courses are developed in learning management systems. It introduces the features of distance education as well as the biometric sensor operation. It describes the changes that are necessary to introduce the learning management system in order to use the fingerprint as data in the process of authentication. Finally, we perform tests of assessment for the new authentication system in lab sessions at the college.

This article describes in detail the main achievements in authoring and reuse of educational materials within the eMadrid project.

In this article, we present a semester-long study on using smartphone devices in computing engineering education. We developed Sortko, an Android-based smartphone application for learning sorting algorithms, an important undergraduate computer science topic. The application consists of four main components—the module for interactive sorting, the scaffolding module, the motivational module, and the graphical user interface module, each with a distinct role of helping students in learning sorting algorithms. Our research methodology included data collection with administered two surveys, collected exam results and recorded application usage data. Analysis of the collected data shows our approach is an effective way of learning sorting algorithms. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 21:E41–E50, 2013

The emergence of mobile and ubiquitous technologies as important tools to complement formal learning has been accompanied by a growing interest in their educational benefits and applications. Mobile devices can be used to promote learning anywhere and anytime, to foster social learning and knowledge sharing, or to visualize augmented reality applications for learning purposes. However, the development of these applications is difficult for many researchers because it requires understanding many different protocols; dealing with distributed schemas, processes, platforms, and services; learning new programming languages; and interacting with different hardware sensors and drivers. For that reason, the use of frameworks and middleware that encapsulate part of this complexity appears to be fundamental to the further development of mobile learning projects. This study analyzes the state of the art of frameworks and middleware devoted to simplifying the development of mobile and ubiquitous learning applications. The results can be useful to many researchers involved in the development of projects using these technologies by providing an overview of the features implemented in each of these frameworks.

All the different kinds of education are converging to a blended learning one and a large number of new applications has appeared using educational platforms (LMS, learning management systems). Besides we must have into account the importance of the security in our applications, in order to get a suitable behavior of our system. One of these possible applications would be in the evaluation procedure. This article describes this huge area for higher education considering different technologies where biometric technology will be our cornerstone. Our application will be developed in two different scenarios: in traditional and on-line test.

The use of educational games in an academic context seems to be a superb alternative to traditional learning activities, such as drill-type exercises, in order to engage 21st-century students. Consequently, this work tries to raise the following objectives: analyze the effectiveness of game-based learning, characterize game elements that may contribute to create playing experiences, comprehend how different player types interact with games and, finally, design interactive games which may create challenges, set goals and provide feedback on progress while motivating learners to study physics and chemistry in a foreign language in the second cycle of Secondary Education (4th E.S.O. that corresponds to the age of 15–16 years old). Specifically, we have used several Web 2.0 tools (Hot Potatoes, Scratch, What2Learn and SMART Notebook 11) and applications (Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Excel) in order to create the games; and these games are based on the successive contents: laboratory safety, laboratory equipment, stoichiometry, atomic structure, electronic configuration, the periodic table, forces, motion and energy.

There are many tools that enable the development of the augmented reality (AR) activities, some of them can even create and generate an AR experience where the incorporation of 3D objects is simple. However AR tools used in education are different from the general tools limited to the reproduction of virtual content. The purpose of this paper is to present a learning environment based on augmented reality, which can be used both by teachers to develop quality AR educational resources and by students to acquire knowledge in an area. Common problems teachers have in applying AR have been taken into account by producing an authoring tool for education which includes the following characteristics: (1) the ability to incorporate diverse multimedia resources such as video, sound, images and 3D objects in an easy manner, 2) the ability to incorporate tutored descriptions into elements which are being displayed (thus, the student is provided with an additional information, description or narrative about the resource, while the content gets adapted and personalized), (3) the possibility for the teacher to incorporate multiple choice questions (MCQ) into the virtual resource (useful for instant feedback to students on their understanding, it can be useful for the student to know what are the most important points of that issue and for the teacher to assess whether the student distinguishes different concepts) and (4) a library of virtual content where all resources are available in a simple and transparent way for any user. In this study ARLE is used to add AR technologies into notes or books created by the teacher, thereby supplementing both the theoretical and practical content without any programming skills needed on the designers' behalf. In addition to presenting system architecture and the examples of its educational use, a survey concerning use of AR amongst teachers in Spain has been conducted.

The ability for accessing learning tools at any time and from anywhere is highly increasing. Technologies such as Internet and mobile devices provide universal integration of teaching and learning. For scientific or engineering subjects, the use of real resources through on line laboratories is another step towards bringing the students to the practical laboratory sessions. These platforms show how teacher and student share a common work space in which they work together to solve problems. UNED (Spanish University for Distance Education) is working on the development of techniques that facilitate the building of remote laboratories and their access, both for students and for teachers. Current experience shows that the interaction of the students with these tools makes them more receptive to learning, regardless of their age. It also helps them to understand more easily abstract concepts in engineering and science subjects, associating these abstract concepts with daily life. It is also relevant that students can commit mistakes without any real risk. Moreover as the system will facilitate the building of customized reusable laboratory practices for teachers, these will be motivated to use them in their classrooms whenever possible. Both effects reinforce learning and reaffirm the position of teacher-student couple.

A variety of advanced learning technologies has emerged to enhance learning, promote hands-on experiences, and increase interest in engineering and technical education. The possibility of access to a superior education is on hands of a great number of students while the resources which are available do not increase in the same way, limiting the quality of the teaching, so, it is necessary to look for alternatives that insure an access to the resources of a way regular, monitored an efficient. The remote laboratories avoid these gaps, however the development of these laboratories is of a great cost and their application is very specific. The fact of adding virtual information to the observed results by the students increases the quantity of information, provides us a great absorption of the contents and an expansion of the case studies. That is why it is possible to add the answer to questions like why this happens, or what would happen if the conditions of the experiment were different. The augmented reality provides an easy way to control a remote laboratory, creating a realist, simple and practical interface from any place in the world. To achieve the objectives mentioned above, this document shows how you can control a remote laboratory with augmented reality.

This contribution reports on a new European project, Remote-labs Access in Internet-based Performance-Centered Learning Environment for Curriculum Support (RIPLECS), in which an official inter-institutional European master degree program in Information and Communication System (ICS) is created. The program is conducted online across five European institutions and is oriented to labor market needs for qualified graduates, with special focus on realizing real-world experiments in each subject remotely. The network architecture of RIPLECS platform enables world-wide distribution of learning resources by utilizing multiple Web servers at several European universities, within a single network topology. The paper discusses the project development stages, implementation and the expected outcomes.

until a few decades ago, face to face classrooms and hand-on laboratories were the common solution for teaching theory and practice. But, new e-Learning tools have emerged and learning methodologies such as blended and distance learning have taken an important space in learning initiatives. Among them are virtual and remote Labs which provide student with a learning environment where can carry out the experiments through Internet and acquire the needed skills to develop his future jobs. This paper describes the importance of virtual and remote labs and their usage in learning scenarios.

There is no doubt that the implementation of practical sessions in engineering education paves the way for students to be familiar with the instruments and thus, with the industrial real-world. Moreover, they augment the learning outcomes by strengthening the understanding of scientific concepts and theories. Unfortunately, there exist a wide gap between the engineering educational curricula and the industrial real-world owing to the lack of experimentation availability. This is due to high cost and administration burdens that have hindered the adoption of practical sessions causing a significant decline in experimentation within engineering education. Recently, with the advent and exploitation of computer and communication technologies, remote laboratories have broadly proliferated among many universities. Remote laboratories provide on-line ubiquitous workbenches unconstrained by neither temporal nor geographical considerations and allow an interactive learning environment that maintains student attention. In this context, hundreds of remote laboratories for industrial electronics applications have been developed and numerous technologies have emerged in order to facilitate their construction and implementation. This paper reports on state-of-art remote laboratories for industrial electronics applications. and their design stages. The paper addresses many solutions in the development and the design stages, along with cutting edge technologies involved. This is in order to foster remote laboratories adoption within industrial electronics disciplines and hence, increase the industrial competencies in engineering education.

The proliferation of remote laboratories in multiple disciplines of science has removed the cost and administration burdens that hinder the adoption of practical sessions in engineering education. Remote laboratories provide online workbenches unconstrained by neither temporal nor geographical considerations and allow an interactive learning that maintains student attention. Recently, remote laboratories have been developed at multiple universities and adopted in engineering education. Furthermore, some of these laboratories are replicated at many universities such as the electronic circuit's remote labs: NetLab, VISIR, and labs based on NI ELVIS II. This was the commence of a new mainstream which advocates a better remodeling of those laboratories to allow their allocation, sharing among universities, and their communication with other heterogeneous systems, e.g., Learning Management Systems (LMS). In this context, numerous sharable educational architectures for remote labs integration have emerged such as LiLa, Lab 2 go, ISILab, DCL, WebLab Deusto, iLab (ISA), and Labshare (Sahara). This paper reports on the emerging solutions for remote laboratories implementation and deployment in engineering education in an efficient way. The paper discusses different integration scenarios pointing out features, limitations, and upcoming challenges.

This paper introduces the development of a Web-based platform that serves as tool to analyze the evolution and necessities of the new technologies in the education of engineering, as well as to evaluate those that finally will have more possibilities to be implanted. This platform gathers the opinion of engineering education experts to create visual comparisons of the results. The analysis offered by the platform is cross-discipline, cross-country, cross-continent, and cross-technology comparisons.

Mobile learning is impacting education using different technologies and methodologies. This article introduces two relevant learning experiences at UNED where new mobile technologies and pedagogical methodologies were applied. The first experience was based on a ubiquitous annotation system, while the second one used augmented reality to create an engaging mobile collaborative and open environment where students were learners and teachers at the same time, publishing content and learning from the content published by other peers.

This article analyzes the use of wireless systems in learning environments and explains the advantages of these when robots are used for educational purposes in recreational and industrial environments. This article reflects the importance that these tools may have in safety, efficiency and productivity of training in learning and e-learning as well as the motivation that this systems cause on the students.

Online learning tools, such as courseware, learning management system, assessment tools, virtual, and remote laboratories are used in blended and distance learning. These online tools, Apart from being able to provide learning activities, allow displaying learning resources such as web pages, pdf or doc files and multimedia contents. This paper describes some online learning tools and the challenges to apply them in distance learning.

In this paper we present a semester-long study on using smart phone devices in computer science engineering education. We developed Sortko, an Android smart phone application, which helps students in learning sorting algorithms, an important undergraduate computer science topic. The application consists of four main components - the module for interactive sorting, the scaffolding module, the motivational module and the graphical user interface module, each with a distinct role of helping students in learning sorting algorithms. Our research methodology included data collection in which we administered two surveys, collected exam and usage results. Analysis of the collected data shows our approach is an effective way of learning sorting algorithms.

This paper introduces the use of interactive animations in a blended learning approach for a digital electronics course. These interactive animations help students in the concepts acquisition, thanks to their visual and interactive features. The designed animations include all kind of logic gates (e.g., OR, AND, NOR; NAND, EXOR), Boole's algebra, many combinational and sequential circuits (e.g., coders, decoders, multiplexors, demultiplexors, comparators, synchronous and asynchronous flip-flops, chronograms, synchronous and asynchronous counters, and shift registries). These interactive animations have been embedded in many examples, exercises and auto-evaluation exams, which facilitate the understanding of the different concepts. Besides, these interactive animations have been encapsulated as learning objects and included in a learning object repository. Thus, anyone in the Web can search, find and use these digital resources. Finally, these interactive animations have been used in two different environments: high school and distance learning university. A different methodology has been used in each one of these environments to fit its requirements.

Practical sessions are the backbone of qualification in engineering education. It leads to a better understanding and allows mastering scientific concepts and theories. The lack of the availability of practical sessions at many universities and institutions owing to the cost and the unavailability of instructors the most of the time caused a significant decline in experimentation in engineering education over the last decades. Recently, with the progress of computer-based learning, remote laboratories have been proven to be the best alternative to the traditional ones, regarding to its low cost and ubiquity. Some universities have already started to deploy remote labs in their practical sessions. This contribution compiles diverse experiences based on the deployment of the remote laboratory, Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR), on the practices of undergraduate engineering grades at various universities within the VISIR community. It aims to show the impact of its usage on engineering education concerning the assessments of students and teachers as well.

Spanish National University for Distance Education (UNED) has a great number of students located in different places from Spain, Europe and South America. By this reason, it is necessary to use e-learning tools that make easier learning process of our students. Nowadays, there are many e-learning tools in the World Wide Web, for instance: Learning management systems (LMS), courseware or online laboratories. In this paper we are going to describe the design, implementation and use of an assessment tool developed by Electrical and Computer Engineering Department that is able to work along with other learning systems (for instance a LMS, online laboratories, etc.) with the objective of improving learning processes.

This research describes the method of combining traditional authentication (password and username) with biometric technology, specifically fingerprint authentication. This authentication model is applied in distance education where courses are developed in learning management systems. It introduces the features of distance education as well as the biometric sensor operation. It describes the changes that are necessary to introduce in the learning management system in order to use the fingerprint as a data in the process of authentication. Finally, we performed tests of assessment the new authentication system in lab sessions at the college.

Technology-enhanced learning is not just interacting with learning objects. Physical labs are another useful resource in education, especially for engineering and science education. They are confined to the physical location they are bound to. It is obviously interesting for any learning process to be able to open up this access from remote locations in the same effective way as learning objects are accessed through a Learning Management System, taking advantage of the provided services, such as authentication, group building, etc.

IPLECS is a virtual campus platform for the development of performance-centered reusable learning materials, and its application in mLearning for educational and training purposes. The combination of performance support systems and mobile devices present both opportunities and challenges for work-based learning design.

In the last years, authoring based on e-learning standards has been consolidated as a core factor of industry and development of interoperable and effective virtual learning environments. However, there is a need for further research on abstraction to provide a more instructional view in the context of authoring tools in a variety of ways, in order to avoid being driven by Learning Technology (LT) specifications, facilitate instructional knowledge aggregation, and to provide an appropriate level of clarity and semantics in the design of collaborative activities. We propose a combination of techniques to provide this instructional abstraction in the context of the new European educational model, combining instructional layers and collaborative scripts in authoring tools, and semantic web techniques for extending e-learning material in order to harness the wealth of existing web content and semantically labeled repositories.

Higher education has undergone a deep change in Europe since Bologna Declaration. One of the main tools to affront this change is through the incorporation of new technologies and learning methods, such as mobile and blended learning. This paper shows new services aimed to provide a personalized and closer education to learners. It will be achieved thanks to the integration of new services into the existing educational environment, giving rise to the concept of service-based learning. This concept is based on the philosophy of re-usable educative objects to create encapsulated and re-usable educative services easily integrated in e-learning platforms.

This paper addresses the issue of the creation of context-aware applications inside the Mobile-Learning approach. It tries to clarify aspects like the most suitable environments of application; how new features of mobile devices, such as GPS (Global Positioning System) receivers, motion sensors, etc., must be taken into account. It also addresses why most of the m-Learning applications do not make use of the existing services and knowledge of the Learning Management Systems, which are in fact the real pillars of the e-learning methodology. Finally, the architectural design of a context-aware framework created by the authors is described. The main contribution of this framework is to provide contextual information from different sources, including different kind of geographical sensors (allowing roaming among them) and external services. As result of the work, the middleware has been developed and it is being used in the development of several m-learning projects.

Nowadays there are a great number of universities and organizations working on developing virtual labs. These virtual labs allow students to carry out their experiments and acquire practical knowledge. At the same time these universities are using one or several learning management systems that allow professors to display and organize theoretical content. A good solution is the integration of learning management system and virtual labs. That is what we are going to describe in this paper. We are working on a middleware that allows using the LMS's services together with the virtual labs.

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.

The application of the RFID technologies to the university environment provides a more secure and effective examination process by reducing the waiting time to access the class and identifying the students that enter and exit the examination room in real time. This technology has particular relevance for universities with a high number of students that must ensure the entrance to an examination room in a short period of time.