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El treball desenvolupa, en primer lloc, l’estudi de què és un model educatiu i curricular basat en competències, quines característiques, conseqüències i dificultats comporta aquest enfocament curricular i com el projecte d’implantació de l’1 per 1 als nostres centres, per part del departament d’educació, ens pot ajudar a l’assoliment de les competències. A partir d’aquí, plantegem els recursos i pràctiques socioculturals per a l’ensenyament de l’estadística i la probabilitat a secundària que hem trobat més interessants i que acompleixen amb el model educatiu basat en competències, per tal de treballar amb les TIC a l’aula. Fem un estudi dels reculls que actualment podem trobar a la xarxa, tant a nivell estatal com europeu, com funcionen i en què poden ser-nos útils per a aquest treball en concret, mostrant alguns exemples de funcionament general. Per ajudar a la comprensió de com funcionen aquestes pràctiques, en desenvolupem dues d’elles completament, afegint les incorporacions que hi podríem fer i els programes informàtics que l’alumnat hauria d’utilitzar al fer-les. Una de les pràctiques està enfocada a l’ensenyament d’estadística per al segon curs de l’ESO, i l’altra a l’ensenyament de la probabilitat per al quart curs de l’ESO. El treball conclou amb les consideracions personals que resulten de tot l’estudi realitzat, tenint en compte que l’opinió actual anirà evolucionant a partir de l’experiència docent que anirem adquirint, i que la incorporació de les noves tecnologies de la informació i la comunicació a l’aula haurà de ser un procés de canvi no immediat, sinó a molt llarg termini.

Proyecto dedicado al desarrollo de una aplicación web que simula un juego de carreras en el que se tiene que programar el comportamiento del coche. Por lo tanto pretende ser una herramienta didáctica con la que alumnos de secundaria puedan aprender a programar de forma amena mientras juegan.

This paper aims to explore two crucial aspects of collaborative work and learning: on the one hand, the importance of enabling collaborative learning applications to capture and structure the information generated by group activity and, on the other hand, to extract the relevant knowledge in order to provide learners and tutors with efficient awareness, feedback and support with regards to group performance and collaboration. To this end, in this paper we first propose a conceptual model for data analysis and management that identifies and classifies the many kinds of indicators that describe collaboration and learning into high-level aspects of collaboration. Then, we provide a computational platform that, at a first step, collects and classifies both the event information generated asynchronously from the users' actions and the labeled dialogues from the synchronous collaboration according to these indicators. This information is then analyzed in next steps to eventually extract and present to participants the relevant knowledge about the collaboration. The ultimate aim of this platform is to efficiently embed information and knowledge into collaborative learning applications. We eventually suggest a generalization of our approach to be used in diverse collaborative learning situations and domains.

Mobile collaborative learning is considered the next step of on-line collaborative learning by incorporating mobility as a key and breakthrough requirement. Indeed, the current wide spread of mobile devices and wireless technologies brings an enormous potential to e-learning, in terms of ubiquity, pervasiveness, personalization, flexibility, and so on. For this reason, Mobile Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning has recently grown from a minor research field to significant research projects covering a fairly variety of formal and specially informal learning settings, from schools and universities to workplaces, museums, cities and rural areas. Much of this research has shown how mobile technology can offer new opportunities for groups of learners to collaborate inside and beyond the traditional instructor-oriented educational paradigm. However, mobile technologies, when specifically applied to collaborative learning activities, are still in its infancy and many challenges arise. In addition, current research in this domain points to highly specialized study cases, uses, and experiences in specific educational settings and thus the issues addressed in the literature are found dispersed and disconnected from each other. To this end, this paper attempts to bridge relevant aspects of mobile technologies in support for collaborative learning and provides a tighter view by means of a multidimensional approach.

This article presents a novel educational software package which develops an Interactive Didactic Application(IDA) created by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia(UPC), and which contains the essentials of textile design. It is an open application which uses a database in ASCII format. The principal elements of this database are lists of whole numbers structured according to indexed colors in standard RGB format. This generates a rational system of indexes of numerical lists, which allows us to transmit knowledge in the different areas, which use images in their processes, with application in textile design, engineering graphics, mathematical transformations or indexation logic, among others. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 20: 161–174, 2012

Data mining algorithms have been proved to be useful for the processing of large data sets in order to extract relevant information and knowledge. Such algorithms are also important for analyzing data collected from the users' activity users. One family of such data analysis is that of mining of log files of online applications that register the actions of online users during long periods of time. A relevant objective in this case is to study the behavior of online users and feedback the design processes of online applications to provide better usability and adaption to users' preferences. The context of this work is that of a virtual campus in which thousands of students and tutors carry out the learning and teaching activity using online applications. The information stored in log files of virtual campuses tend to be large, complex and heterogeneous in nature. Hence, their mining requires both efficient and intelligent processing and analysis of user interaction data during long-term learning activities. In this paper, we present a bi-clustering algorithm for processing large log data sets from the online daily activity of students in a real virtual campus. Our approach is useful to extract relevant knowledge about user activity such as navigation patterns, activities performed as well as to study time parameters related to such activities. The extracted information can be useful not only to students and tutors to stimulate and improve their experience when interacting with the system but also to the designers and developers of the virtual campus in order to better support the online teaching and learning.

Este trabajo recoge la experiencia de un grupo de profesorado de la ETSEIAT(UPC) que ha complementado su material docente convencional con vídeos de bajo coste (vídeo-stream) expuestos en Canales YouTube que permiten compartir y vincular vídeos de asignaturas de Ingeniería Industrial, Ingeniería Aeronáutica e Ingeniería en Organización Industrial. La plataforma YouTube, de rápido acceso, posibilita la creación de canales personalizados con la garantía de que el estudiantado conoce su funcionamiento, facilitando la incorporación de este nuevo escenario en su formación. Para desarrollar este trabajo, se ha realizado la necesaria formación del profesorado en la creación, edición y gestión de canales YouTube y de vídeos de bajo coste. Posteriormente, se han vinculado los canales YouTube creados en un canal ETSEIAT, y se han recogido evidencias del estudiantado acerca del uso, provecho y medida de la incidencia de estos materiales en su proceso de formación

Des de fa molt de temps s’ha investigat i es continua investigant avui dia diferents metodologies educatives amb la finalitat de millorar l’ensenyament i l’aprenentatge en qualsevol àmbit educatiu. A més, els recursos tecnològics es continuen ampliant i cada cop disposem de més eines que faciliten i milloren les tasques tant del professorat com de l’alumnat. No només això, sinó que permeten introduir noves tècniques que abans no eren possibles. A pesar d’això, en qualsevol institut català actual la major part de l’ensenyament i l’aprenentatge es continua fent de la mateixa forma que tradicionalment, sense prestar atenció a aquestes eines i avanços educatius. 110 En el Treball Fi de Màster Implementar el treball cooperatiu utilitzant les TIC analitza perquè resulta necessari introduir alguns canvis en les metodologies tradicionals amb la incorporació del treball cooperatiu en l’educació secundària i de quins recursos de les TIC (Tecnologies de la Informació i la Comunicació) es disposen en el sistema educatiu que poden ajudar a realitzar aquesta feina i fins i tot millorar-la. A més, amb la intenció de que pugui servir de guia, aquest treball explica com fer servir alguns dels recursos de Moodle per a aconseguir aquest objectiu i proposa un recull d’activitats orientades a aplicar el treball cooperatiu en diversos grups de l’educació secundària que serveixin d’exemples per a la creació de noves activitats i unitats didàctiques centrades en aquesta tècnica de treball. Finalment, es presenten les conclusions a les que s’han arribat durant la realització del treball, que aporten aspectes positius i també negatius de l’experiència

Projecte presentat al 3r Premi a la Qualitat de la Gestió Universitària, convocat pel Consell Social de la UPC Award-winning

La introducció de les TIC a l'educació està provocant un canvi dels mètodes pedagògics en el sistema educatiu. A grans trets l'estudi es basa en una anàlisi dels diferents models tecnològics per introduir les TIC a l'educació, i s'aprofunditza amb el dossier personal d'aprenentatge digital, com a eina educativa.

This master thesis aims to offer a state of the art technological vision of the current internet services provided and used by the top reference social network platforms. This study will pay especial attention to different technologies exporting and exporting content around the net. This Master Thesis has been developed inside the e-Catalunya frame project, an iniciative promoted by Generalitat de Catalunya in collaboration with the Barcelona Faculty of Informatics (FIB). E-Catalunya is a web 2.0 platform setting a common workspace that encourages collaboration between different groups within the Catalan society ( e.g: Biblioteques judicial, E-moderadors, medició familiar, veïns). This project has two differentiated main goals. The first one is providing LCFIB and Generalitat de Catalunya with a study about how technologies are being used nowadays by social networks to achieve their social purposes. The second goal is making a decision about which capabilities would be interesting to be aggregated to the platform in order to fulfill current needs and challenges. Finally, a prototype will be developed to analyze the viability of the decisions made.

Projecte presentat al 2n Premi a la Qualitat de la Gestió Universitària, convocat pel Consell Social de la UPC

Modern on-line collaborative learning environments need to be continuously adapted, adjusted, and personalized to each specific target learning group. Moreover, these environments are to enable and scale the involvement of an increasing large number of single/group participants who can geographically be widely distributed, and who need transparently share a huge variety of both software and hardware distributed resources. As a result, collaborative learning applications need to be designed in a way that overcome important non-functional requirements arisen in distributed contexts, such as scalability, availability, interoperability, and integration of different, heterogeneous, and legacy collaborative learning systems. In this paper, an innovative distributed-based approach is presented for increasing the overall performance of collaborative learning systems that contributes to the effectiveness of the collaborative activities, such as online discussions. The experimental results show an outstanding effect on the learning processes and outcomes by enhancing and improving the learning experience a great deal.

Projecte presentat al 2n Premi a la Qualitat de la Gestió Universitària, convocat pel Consell Social de la UPC Award-winning

This work is motivated by the need to develop decentralized P2P approaches to support learning and teaching activity in virtual universities.In this paper, we present the stimulation effects of the SmartBox for e-learning using JXTA-overlay P2P system. We also show the design and implementation of the SmartBox environment that is used for stimulating the learners motivation to increase the learning efficiency. The SmartBox is integrated with our P2P system as a useful tool for monitoring and controlling learners' activity. We found by experimental results thatthe SmartBox is an effective way to increase the learner's concentration. We also investigated the relation between learner's body movement, concentration, and amount of study. We found that when the learner is solving more exerciseshe has more body movements.This shows that when the number of body movements is hight,the learner's concentration is high. We also consider the feasibility of our P2P platform to integrate different computational end-devices.

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) furthers a student-centered system based on the student workload required to achieve the objectives of a study program. In the context of EHEA, e-learning tools provide an outstanding opportunity to discuss mathematical activity in the 21st-century classroom. In 2002, the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) undertook the use of a virtual teaching tool, the virtual campus Atenea. Since 2005 Atenea has been based on Moodle, an open source learning management system designed to help educators create quality online courses and administer learner outcomes. From the wide range of tools offered by Moodle, we are focusing on the quiz module. This module allows the creation of quizzes with different types of question, adapted to the specific objectives to be reached at any step in the teaching-learning process. Moodle quizzes contribute to the development of new strategies not feasible with paper-and-pencil tests. To explore how to apply these new strategies in the development of a substantial bank of quiz questions, we are carrying out projects subsidised by the Institute of Education Sciences of the UPC. This contribution focuses on the assessment of three Moodle quizzes for Calculus topics that were designed to be answered by around 70 first-year students of the School of Civil Engineering (UPC) in the course 2007/2008. In particular, the aims are to analyse students’ answers and to carry out a psychometric analysis to identify the appropriateness of the questions stated in the quizzes.

This poster focuses on the design, implementation and assessment of a range of Moodle quiz question pools. From these pools, we intend to generate quizzes for the compulsory undergraduate subjects of the applied mathematics field included in the first- and second-year syllabus for all branches of Engineering, following the guidelines of the European higher education area.

In this paper, we present the experimental results and evaluation of the SmartBox stimulation device in P2P e-learning system which is based on JXTA-Overlay. We also show the design and implementation of the SmartBox environment that is used for stimulating the learners motivation to increase the learning efficiency. The SmartBox is integrated with our P2P system as a useful tool for monitoring and controlling learners' activity. We found by experimental results that the SmartBox is an effective way to increase the learner's concentration. We also investigated the relation between learner's body movement, concentration, and amount of study. From the experimental results, we conclude that the use of SmartBox is an effective way to stimulate the learners in order to continue studying while maintaining the concentration.

This work is motivated by the need to develop decentralized P2P approaches to support learning and teaching activity in virtual universities. In this paper, we present the implementation of the JXTA-based e-learning P2P system. We also show the design and implementation of a SmartBox environment that will be used for stimulating the learners to increase the learning efficiency. The proposed e-learning P2P system is a useful tool for monitoring and controlling learnerspsila activity. We evaluate the proposed system by experimental results and show that proposed system has a good performance. In the future, we aim to use it in real virtual campus environments.

Projecte presentat al 2n Premi a la Qualitat de la Gestió Universitària, convocat pel Consell Social de la UPC Award-winning

En este proyecto se llevará a cabo la puesta en marcha, evaluación y ajuste del Campus Virtual y del Portafolio de auto-evaluación continuada del aprendizaje del alumno/a de la asignatura de Proyectos, diseñado en un proyecto anterior. Los criterios de evaluación de los resultados serán los establecidos en la fase de diseño del proyecto y se irán estableciendo nuevos criterios a lo largo de la implantación del mismo con la finalidad de ayudar al alumno/a a consolidar los conocimientos adquiridos, prepararse para la realización del siguiente ejercicio y prepararse para el examen final. En este Campus Virtual el alumno/a tendrá a su disposición toda la información necesaria para el seguimiento de la asignatura, podrá acceder directamente al Entorno Virtual (donde se realizan los trabajos de grupo en el portafolio electrónico del grupo) y tendrá una zona de auto-evaluación a través de los test creados por los profesores/as. Con los resultados proporcionados tras la realización de cada test, tanto el/la alumno/a como el/la profesor/a, podrán saber el nivel de los conocimientos aprendidos individualmente con el estudio de cada tema y con la realización en grupo del ejercicio correspondiente.

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the JXTA-based e-Learning P2P system. We also show the design and implementation of a smart box environment that will be used for stimulating the learners to increase the learning efficiency. The smart box is intended to be integrated with our P2P system as a useful tool for monitoring and controlling learners' activity. Finally, it is also useful to evaluate the feasibility of our P2P platform to integrate different computational devices

Due to the opportunities provided by the Internet, people are taking advantage of e-learning courses and during the last few years enormous research efforts have been dedicated to the development of e-learning systems. So far, many e-learning systems are proposed and used practically. However, in these systems the e-learning completion rate is low. One of the reasons is the low study desire and motivation. In our previous work, we implemented a e-learning system that is able to increase the learning efficiency by stimulating learners motivation. In this work, we designed and implemented new functions to improve the system performance

The discussion process plays an important social task in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) where participants can discuss about the activity being performed, collaborate with each other through the exchange of ideas that may arise, propose new resolution mechanisms, and justify and refine their own contributions, and as a result acquire new knowledge. Indeed, learning by discussion when applied to collaborative learning scenarios can provide significant benefits for students in collaborative learning, and in education in general. As a result, current educational organizations incorporate in-class online discussions into web-based courses as part of the very rationale of their pedagogical models. However, online discussions as collaborative learning activities are usually greatly participated and contributed, which makes the monitoring and assessment tasks time-consuming, tedious and error-prone. Specially hard if not impossible by humans is to manually deal with the sequences of hundreds of contributions making up the discussion threads and the relations between these contributions. As a result, current assessment in online discussions restricts to offer evaluation results of the content quality of contributions after the completion of the collaborative learning task and neglects the essential issue of constantly assessing the knowledge building as a whole while it is still being generated. In this paper, we propose a multidimensional model based on data analysis from online collaborative discussion interaction that provides a first step towards an automatic assessment in (almost) real time. The context of this study is a real on-line discussion experience that took place at the Open University of Catalonia

The discussion process plays an important social task in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) where participants can discuss about the activity being performed, collaborate with each other through the exchange of ideas that may arise, propose new resolution mechanisms, as well as justify and refine their own contributions and thus acquire new knowledge. Indeed, learning by discussion when applied to collaborative learning scenarios can provide significant benefits for students in collaborative learning, and in education in general. However, the discussion process in the context of distance education presents high drop out in comparison to traditional programs due chiefly to a sense of isolation of participants who do not have knowledge about others nor they can compare their own progress and performance to the group. To alleviate this problem, the provision of appropriate knowledge from the analysis of on-line interaction is rapidly gaining popularity due to its great impact on the discussion performance and outcomes. This implies a need to capture and structure all types of information generated by group activity and then to extract the relevant knowledge in order to provide participants with efficient awareness and feedback as regards group performance and collaboration. As a result, it is necessary to process and analyzed complex event log files from group activity in a constant manner, and thus it may require computational capacity beyond that of a single computer. To this end, in this paper we show how a Grid approach can considerably increase the overall efficiency of processing group activity log files and thus allow discussion participants to receive effective knowledge even in real time. The context of this study is a real discussion experience that took place at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC).

User modelling in on-line distance learning is an important research field focusing on two important aspects: describing and predicting students’ actions and intentions as well as adapting the learning process to students’ features, habits, interests, preferences, and so on. The aim is to greatly stimulate and improve the learning experience. In this context, user modeling implies a constant processing and analysis of user interaction data during long-term learning activities, which produces large and considerably complex information. As a consequence, processing this information is costly and requires computational capacity beyond that of a single computer. In order to overcome this obstacle, in this paper we show how a parallel processing approach can considerably decrease the time of processing log data that come from on-line distance educational web-based systems. The results of our study show the feasibility of using Grid middleware to speed and scale up the processing of log data and thus achieving an efficient and dynamic user modeling in on-line distance learning.

En este documento se incorporan todas las metodologías y especificaciones usadas para la implementación de un sistema hipermedia adaptable a usos educacionales. Contiene datos técnicos, así como formas de elaboración del software con los respectivos documentos de apoyo técnico, con el fin de que pueda ser utilizado por cualquier usuario que proyecte continuar el desarrollo del software o que, simplemente, quiera utilizarlo. Servirá también de apoyo a quien pretenda estudiar el impacto de este tipo de software, ya que se describen los estudios realizados en el área de impacto del mismo. Entiéndase por este tipo de aplicación (Hipermedia Adaptable) una alineación de las tecnologías hipermedia tradicionales con los llamados “tutores inteligentes”, con el objetivo de proporcionar la información ideal, de la manera ideal, teniendo como base tres principios básicos: ser una aplicación hipermedia, poseer un modelo de dominio (que representa el conocimiento sobre la enseñanza) y un modelo de usuario (esquema de representación de las características del aprendiz). El objetivo es desarrollar una aplicación que permita a cada estudiante, en cada situación concreta, el suministro adecuado de material de estudio para las asignaturas que pretende realizar. Siendo ésta una aplicación hipermedia adaptable, podemos destacar el hecho de que se permite, en cualquier momento, que el estudiante pueda alterar sus preferencias y estilo de aprendizaje, alterando así los contenidos que se facilitan. Con entornos gráficos completamente interactivos y adaptables para con el usuario, es una aplicación destinada, esencialmente, a la adaptación de contenidos de carácter educacional (material de estudio y las respectivas evaluaciones) en consonancia con el grado de conocimiento del usuario. Concluimos, tras las pruebas y cuestionarios realizados, que este tipo de aplicación podrá permitir mejores resultados en el estudio, permitiendo una mayor autonomía al estudiante, y un estudio más adaptado a cada persona, accediendo a un mejor aprendizaje. Es un tipo de aprendizaje que agrada a los estudiantes, porque les facilita hacer las cosas a su manera, a su ritmo.