Search

Contribution: This article provides evidence on the effectiveness of game-based learning (GBL) for computer science education when using educational video games created by teachers using authoring tools. Background: Although teacher-oriented authoring tools for creating educational video games can help overcome the main barriers hampering the use and uptake of GBL, there is a lack of studies examining the effectiveness of educational video games authored by teachers using these authoring tools by means of rigorous scientific methods. Research Questions: Is GBL using teacher-authored games more effective than traditional teaching in terms of motivation for computer science students? Is GBL using teacher-authored games more effective than traditional teaching in terms of knowledge acquisition for computer science students? Methodology: Two randomized control trials with pretest, post-test, and one questionnaire were conducted to compare the effectiveness of traditional teaching and GBL in two computer science courses. The sample of the two experiments was composed by 75 and 49 students, respectively. Half of the students attended a traditional lecture, while the other half learned solely by playing teacher-authored educational video games. Findings: The results show that GBL using teacher-authored games was practically as effective as traditional teaching in terms of knowledge acquisition, but that it was emphatically successful in increasing student motivation. Students who learned by playing educational video games found the experience more motivating and fun than their counterparts, and a vast majority of them preferred the GBL approach over traditional teaching.

Educational Data Virtual Lab (EDVL) is an open-source platform for data exploration and analysis that combines the power of a coding environment, the convenience of an interactive visualization engine, and the infrastructure needed to handle the complete data lifecycle. Based on the building blocks of the FIWARE European platform and Apache Zeppelin, this tool allows domain experts to become acquainted with data science methods using the data available within their own organization, ensuring that the skills they acquire are relevant to their field and driven by their own professional goals. We used EDVL in a pilot study in which we carried out a focus group within a multinational company to gain insight into potential users' perceptions of EDVL, both from the educational and operational points of view. The results of our evaluation suggest that EDVL holds a great potential to train the workforce in data science skills and to enable collaboration among professionals with different levels of expertise.

In recent years, escape rooms have become one of the leading leisure activities worldwide. Derived from these activities, educational escape rooms have emerged as a new type of teaching practice with the promise of enhancing students’ learning through highly engaging experiences. The rapid rise of educational escape rooms has led to a misalignment between educators’ needs for being able to implement this novel teaching practice and the availability of tools to ease the process. Moreover, this lack of support is preventing teachers and students from taking full advantage of the potential of educational escape rooms. This article provides a road map of the most urgent issues to be addressed to bridge the aforementioned gap: easing the creation of digital puzzles, aiding in the logistical aspects of conducting an educational escape room, harnessing learning analytics, fostering remote collaboration, and integrating artificial intelligence to adapt the experience to each team.

There is a worrying gap between the digital competence that teachers must have to effectively develop their students’ digital competence and the one they actually have, especially in the area related to the safe and responsible use of technology. Further investigation is needed on the use of training activities, methods and tools aimed at enhancing this competence. This article examines, in the context of an online course in MOOC format, the usefulness of Social Lab, a simulated social network, as an educational tool to improve the digital competence of teachers in the area of safe and responsible use of technology.

Previous research on game-based learning has provided firm empirical evidence that playing educational video games can positively impact students’ motivation and learning outcomes at all levels of education and disciplines. However, the use and uptake of game-based learning in educational settings is being hampered by the lack of authoring tools capable of allowing teachers to easily create educational video games and adapt them according to their needs and contexts of use. Moreover, in order to determine to which extent this kind of tools are useful for teachers to conduct effective game-based learning experiences, further research is required to evaluate these tools from the teachers’ perspective, as well as to evaluate the instructional effectiveness of the educational video games that teachers can create by using them. This article contributes to fill this research gap by presenting a teacher-oriented authoring tool for educational games called SGAME, as well as by examining the teachers’ perceptions toward this tool and the effect of the educational video games it allows to create on students’ perceptions and learning outcomes. A total of three evaluation instruments were used: a questionnaire to collect teachers’ perceptions toward the SGAME authoring tool, another questionnaire to collect students’ perceptions toward a game created with SGAME, and a pre-test and a post-test to measure the students’ learning gains achieved by playing this game. A total of 201 teachers and 79 students participated in the evaluation reported in this article. The results of this article show that SGAME is an easy-to-use authoring tool that allows teachers to create motivating and effective educational video games.

Nowadays, it is mandatory to complement the traditional learning methods with active ones that enhance the student’s motivation and facilitate the development of technical and soft competences. LEGO®Serious Play is an experiential methodology designed to enhance innovation and performance in the business world and it is fully aligned with these needs. Previous researches show that this methodology has great potential in engineering education, and specifically in software engineering education. This paper presents an original LEGO®Serious Play activity to teach in a playful and active way software engineering concepts such as life cycle models and software development activities, which can be extrapolated to other engineering fields. This activity was validated through a case study involving 242 computer science students and it was supported by quantitative and qualitative data gathered from a survey and a post-test. The results indicate that the students found this activity highly fun and motivating as well as very useful to learn about the addressed topics and develop soft skills.

Educational escape rooms are emerging as a new type of learning activity with the potential to enhance students’ learning through highly engaging experiences. However, conducting educational escape rooms effectively is very complex and there are no software tools available for this purpose. This lack of support is hindering the widespread use and adoption of these activities. This article presents Escapp, a web platform that allows teachers to conduct effective and highly engaging educational escape rooms. The platform has been used for conducting three different educational escape rooms (one face-to-face and two remotely) in three higher education settings. Three case studies were conducted to empirically evaluate the usefulness of Escapp for conducting these activities, which involved more than 400 students. On the one hand, a questionnaire was administered to students to gather their opinions on the Escapp platform, obtaining very positive results in terms of overall usefulness, usability and engagement. On the other hand, data automatically recorded by Escapp during the three educational escape rooms are presented as evidence of the high number of student interactions that take place during activities of this kind and the need of using a software system for conducting them in an effective way. The results of this article show that Escapp is a well-suited solution for conducting effective face-to-face and remote educational escape rooms.

In recent years, educational escape rooms have started to gain momentum in the academic community. Prior research has reported on the use of educational escape rooms in several fields. However, earlier works have failed to assess the impact of this sort of activities for teaching programming in terms of learning effectiveness. This work fills the existing gap in the literature by examining an educational escape room for teaching programming in a higher education setting by means of three different instruments: (1) a pre-test and a post-test for measuring learning gains, (2) a survey for assessing students' perceptions, and (3) a web platform for recording student interaction data during the activity. The results of this work provide, for the first time, empirical evidence that educational escape rooms are an effective and engaging way of teaching programming.

The COVID-19 pandemic imposed in many countries, in the short term, the interruption of face-to-face teaching activities and, in the medium term, the existence of a &lsquo, new normal&rsquo, in which teaching methods should be able to switch from face-to-face to remote overnight. However, this flexibility can pose a great difficulty, especially in the assessment of practical courses with a high student&ndash, teacher ratio, in which the assessment tools or methods used in face-to-face learning are not ready to be adopted within a fully online environment. This article presents a case study describing the transformation of the assessment method of a programming course in higher education to a fully online format during the COVID-19 pandemic, by means of an automated student-centered assessment tool. To evaluate the new assessment method, we studied students&rsquo, interactions with the tool, as well as students&rsquo, perceptions, which were measured with two different surveys: one for the programming assignments and one for the final exam. The results show that the students&rsquo, perceptions of the assessment tool were highly positive: if using the tool had been optional, the majority of them would have chosen to use it without a doubt, and they would like other courses to involve a tool like the one presented in this article. A discussion about the use of this tool in subsequent years in the same and related courses is also presented, analyzing the sustainability of this new assessment method.

Nowadays, the use of authoring tools has become the most popular way in which teachers create learning resources. These tools commonly facilitate the creation of educational content by combining text, self-assessed activities, and multimedia resources, often allowing authors to export the result in a standard format. Although there are many tools available, it is difficult to find a tool that meets the needs of all users. In order to fulfill the requirements of specific learning scenarios, one possible solution is to adapt an existing e-Learning authoring tool. However, to do so in an easy way, authoring tools should be built on the principles of modular architecture to facilitate and encourage developers to contribute, which is often not the case. This article presents Ediphy, a modular and extensible open-source web authoring tool for the creation of interactive educational content. Its modular nature, based on plugins, makes it easy to extend the tool with new functionalities to meet the requirements of specific educational settings. In order to evaluate Ediphy, two surveys have been conducted: one among end users who have used Ediphy to create learning resources and another one among developers who have contributed to its improvement. Results show that end users have a great opinion of Ediphy and developers find it easy to contribute.

This article analyzes the existing management systems to be used as repository of Open Educational Resources for acquiring practical competences. The resources to be managed are mainly virtual and remote labs used in several European projects focused on improving the competitiveness of European SMEs. These virtual and remote labs may be based on different technologies, such as web pages, mobile apps, web services, virtual machines, etc. This wide variety of educational resources makes difficult the selection of a common management system to be used as repository for storage and delivery. The result of the analysis shows that the ViSH platform fits all the defined requirements.

The European electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services (eIDAS) regulation makes available a solution to ensure the cross-border mutual recognition of electronic IDentification (eID) mechanisms among Member States. However, the basic set of attributes currently provided by each country only contains citizens&rsquo, personal and legal attributes, preventing e-services to take full advantage of citizens&rsquo, domain-specific information, such as academic or medical data. In this article, we propose an extension of the eIDAS specification to support academic attributes as part of citizens&rsquo, profiles. In addition, we present an architecture to enable the connection of eIDAS nodes to national attribute providers to enrich citizens&rsquo, profiles with additional academic attributes. We have deployed the eIDAS extension in the specific case of the Spanish eIDAS infrastructure, and we have connected it to an attribute provider of the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). We have also improved a set of institutional services of that university by enabling the connection to eIDAS and enhancing the features offered to students based on their academic profiles retrieved from the eIDAS extended infrastructure. Finally, we have evaluated the resulting services thanks to real students from two different countries, concluding that the widespread adoption of the proposed solution in the academic services of European universities will greatly improve their quality and usability.

There is a clear need to promote motivating and effective training actions for the development of teachers’ digital competence, especially in the area of e-safety. Although educational video game-based learning has proven effective to improve motivation and learning outcomes, the existing evidence about its effectiveness for the development of teachers’ digital competence is very limited. This study examines the use of educational video games in an online course in MOOC format with the aim of developing teachers’ digital competence in the e-safety area. A total of 179 teachers from nonuniversity schools in the region of Castilla y León (Spain) participated in this study. A pre-test and a post-test were used to measure the knowledge acquired by the participants, and a questionnaire was used to measure their perceptions. The obtained results suggest that game-based learning using educational video games is an effective and viable approach to train teachers in the e-safety area of digital competence.

Authoring tools play a crucial role in the development of learning content facilitating the creation of Learning Objects. However, not much work has been done in order to determine if educators actually can use these tools to create effective and reusable Learning Objects in an easy way. This paper address this issue by presenting and evaluating an open source authoring tool called ViSH Editor. Three factors were evaluated: the usability and user acceptance of the authoring tool, the quality and learning effectiveness of the created Learning Objects, and the reusability of these resources. Usability was evaluated through a lab test and the user acceptance with a survey among 180 users. Quality evaluation was conducted using LORI (Learning Object Review Instrument). The learning effectiveness was evaluated through learner surveys and test scores. Finally, reusability was evaluated by using the LORI instrument, by measuring metadata quality using a set of metrics, and by a quantitative analysis of reuse. Results show that ViSH Editor is an authoring tool capable of allowing educators to create effective and reusable Learning Objects in an easy way. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 25:188–199, 2017; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI 10.1002/cae.21789

Videos are extensively used nowadays to support learners in a variety of educational settings such as traditional online courses, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), flipped classrooms, and blended courses. Therefore, it is of prime importance to develop methodologies capable of producing effective video-based learning courses which can lead to the highest success and learner satisfaction. AMMIL (Active Meaningful Micro-Inductive Learning) is a methodology for creating video-based learning courses, which aims to maximise the instructional effectiveness in terms of motivation and academic performance in self-learning environments. This methodology has been successfully used to create several MOOCs, as well as to support a blended programming course at a higher education institution. This paper presents the AMMIL methodology and an evaluation of two different MOOCs and a higher education programming course in which this methodology was applied. This evaluation was conducted by using student surveys as data collection instruments. The results are very promising since they show that students were very satisfied with the courses created applying the AMMIL methodology.

Secure Electronic Identification (eID) is one of the key enablers of data protection, privacy and prevention of online fraud. However, to date, the lack of a common legal basis prevented European Member States from recognising and accepting eIDs issued by the other Member States. The electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Service (eIDAS) regulation solves these issues by allowing citizens of any European country to use their national eIDs to securely access public and private e-services provided in other European countries. However, the minimum dataset typically provided by the Member States only contains citizens? personal attributes. Therefore, academic services that aim to facilitate the mobility of students within the European Union cannot exploit the advantages of integrating students? eIDs to the same extent as if they included attributes related to their academic profile as well. In this article, we propose an extension of the eIDAS specification in order to support academic attributes. Thanks to this extension, services can request students? information from the eIDAS nodes: not only their personal profiles but also additional attributes related to their academic profile. In this work, we also propose an architecture that allows the connection of the national eIDAS nodes to academic attribute providers in order to enrich the student minimum dataset with their academic attributes. We conclude that thanks to the extension of the eID profile of students with academic attributes, e-services in higher education sectors will be able to fully benefit from the integration of the eIDAS initiative, breaking barriers and favouring students? mobility within the European Union.