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Student satisfaction surveys are widely accepted for measuring the quality of students’ overall experience with the received teaching and informing the design of improvements in higher education. However, several studies have shown that these surveys have biases that may lead to discrimination or unfair decisions against female academics. Yet it is unclear how these undesirable factors are evolving with time or to what extent they are present in different contexts. In this study, we investigate survey results from a large University in Spain for two academic years, 2021–2022 and 2022–2023. Our analysis examines these gender biases by evaluating the influencing factors from the perspective of professors and students at the level of the entire university and individual centers. The results obtained using this approach provide multifaceted evidence of gender bias disadvantaging women, especially in some academic disciplines, and that is particularly noticeable in the extremes of student satisfaction distributions.

Objective:This study aims to test the hypothesis that breathing can be directly linked to postural stability and psychological health. A protocol enabling the simultaneous analysis of breathing, posture, and emotional levels in university students is presented. This aims to verify the possibility of defining a triangular link and to test the adequacy of various measurement techniques.Participants and Procedure:Twenty-three subjects (9 females and 14 males), aged between 18 and 23 years, were recruited. The experiment consisted of four conditions, each lasting 3 minutes: Standard quiet standing with open eyes 1), with closed eyes 2), and relaxed quiet standing while attempting deep abdominal breathing with open eyes 3) and with closed eyes 4). These latter two acquisitions were performed after subjects were instructed to maintain a relaxed state.Main Outcome Measures:All subjects underwent postural and stability analysis in a motion capture laboratory. The presented protocol enabled the extraction of 4 sets of variables: Stabilometric data, based on the displacement of the center of pressure and acceleration, derived respectively from force plate and wearable sensors. Postural variables: angles of each joint of the body were measured using a stereophotogrammetric system, implementing the Helen Hayes protocol. Breathing compartment: optoelectronic plethysmography allowed the measurement of the percentage of use of each chest compartment. Emotional state was evaluated using both psychometric data and physiological signals. A multivariate analysis was proposed.Results:A holistic protocol was presented and tested. Emotional levels were found to be related to posture and the varied use of breathing compartments. Abdominal breathing proved to be a challenging task for most subjects, especially females, who were unable to control their breathing patterns. In males, the abdominal breathing pattern was associated with increased stability and reduced anxiety.Conclusion:In conclusion, difficulties in performing deep abdominal breathing were associated with elevated anxiety scores and decreased stability. This depicts a circular self-sustaining relationship that may reduce the quality of life, undermine learning, and contribute to muscular co-contraction and the development of musculoskeletal disorders. The presented protocol can be utilized to quantitatively and holistically assess the healthy and/or pathological condition of subjects.

Social media have become an integral part of our lives, expanding our interlinking capabilities to new levels. There is plenty to be said about their positive effects. On the other hand, however, some serious negative implications of social media have been repeatedly highlighted in recent years, pointing at various threats to society and its more vulnerable members, such as teenagers, in particular, ranging from much-discussed problems such as digital addiction and polarization to manipulative influences of algorithms and further to more teenager-specific issues (e.g., body stereotyping). The impact of social media—both at an individual and societal level—is characterized by the complex interplay between the users' interactions and the intelligent components of the platform. Thus, users' understanding of social media mechanisms plays a determinant role. We thus propose a theoretical framework based on an adaptive “Social Media Virtual Companion” for educating and supporting an entire community, teenage students, to interact in social media environments in order to achieve desirable conditions, defined in terms of a community-specific and participatory designed measure of Collective Well-Being (CWB). This Companion combines automatic processing with expert intervention and guidance. The virtual Companion will be powered by a Recommender System (CWB-RS) that will optimize a CWB metric instead of engagement or platform profit, which currently largely drives recommender systems thereby disregarding any societal collateral effect. CWB-RS will optimize CWB both in the short term by balancing the level of social media threats the users are exposed to, and in the long term by adopting an Intelligent Tutor System role and enabling adaptive and personalized sequencing of playful learning activities. We put an emphasis on experts and educators in the educationally managed social media community of the Companion. They play five key roles: (a) use the Companion in classroom-based educational activities; (b) guide the definition of the CWB; (c) provide a hierarchical structure of learning strategies, objectives and activities that will support and contain the adaptive sequencing algorithms of the CWB-RS based on hierarchical reinforcement learning; (d) act as moderators of direct conflicts between the members of the community; and, finally, (e) monitor and address ethical and educational issues that are beyond the intelligent agent's competence and control. This framework offers a possible approach to understanding how to design social media systems and embedded educational interventions that favor a more healthy and positive society. Preliminary results on the performance of the Companion's components and studies of the educational and psychological underlying principles are presented.

Despite the growing interest in using multimodal data to analyse students' actions in Computers-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) settings, studying teacher's orchestration load in such settings remains overlooked. The notion of classroom orchestration, and orchestration load, offer a lens to study the implications of increasingly complex technology-supported learning environments on teacher performance. A combination of multimodal data may aid in understanding teachers' orchestration actions and, as a result, gain insights regarding the orchestration load teachers perceive in scripted CSCL situations. Studying teacher orchestration load in CSCL helps understand the workload teachers experience while facilitating student collaboration and assists in informing design decisions for teacher supporting tools. In this paper, we collect and analyse data from different modalities (i.e. electrodermal activity, observation notes, log data, dashboard screen recordings and responses to self-reported questionnaires) to study teachers' orchestration load in scripted CSCL. A tool called PyramidApp was used to deploy CSCL activities and a teacher-facing dashboard was used to facilitate teachers in managing collaboration in real time. The findings of the study show the potential of multimodal data analysis in investigating and estimating the orchestration load experienced by teachers in scripted CSCL activities. Study findings further demonstrate factors emerging from multimodal data such as task type, activity duration, and number of students influenced teachers' orchestration load.

This paper reports the co-creation process carried out during the development of a web-based visual representation model for authoring blended learning designs. The results of several participatory design workshops with high school teachers of two school communities have allowed to advance the development process through iterative cycles of refinement and improvement. The authoring tool resulting from the co-creation process supports teachers in the planning and visualization of complex blended learning scenarios (including hybrid massive online courses, flipped classroom and problem-based learning designs). Our experience contributes to the research community with a case study on using co-creation in technology-enhanced learning, where we discuss the challenges and opportunities found during the implementation process of this collaborative and participatory approach.

Technology enhanced learning (TEL) research connects Learning Sciences, Educational Psychology, and Computer Science, in order to investigate interventions based on digital technologies in education and training settings. In this paper, we argue that doctoral training activity for TEL needs to be situated at the intersection of disciplines in order to facilitate innovation. For this, we first review the state of disciplinarity in TEL, reviewing existing meta-studies of the field. Then, we survey 35 doctoral education programs in Europe in which doctoral students working on TEL topics are enrolled. Findings indicate that most doctoral schools are associated with a single discipline and offer methodological rather than content-specific modules. TEL-specific content is provided only in exceptional cases, creating a potentially isolating gap between master-level education and scientific conferences. On this background, we argue that cross-institutional doctoral training is important to progress TEL as a field. In this article, we study and share the approach of an international doctoral summer school organized by the European society EA-TEL over the past 15 years. The summer school provides foundational methodological knowledge from multiple disciplines, content-specific topical knowledge in TEL, access to cutting edge scientific discourse, and discussion of horizontal issues to doctoral students. We further provide an analysis of shifting program topics over time. Our analysis of both, institutional as well as cross-institutional doctoral training in TEL, constitutes this paper’s core contribution in that it highlights that further integration of perspectives and knowledge is to be done in TEL; together with codification and explication of knowledge in the intersection of disciplines.

The role of the learning space is especially relevant in the application of active pedagogies, for example those involving collaborative activities. However, there is limited evidence informing learning design on the potential effects of collaborative learning spaces. In particular, there is a lack of studies generating evidence derived from temporal analyses of the influence of learning spaces on the collaborative learning process. The temporal analysis perspective has been shown to be essential in the analysis of collaboration processes, as it reveals the relationships between students’ actions. The aim of this study is to explore the potential of a temporal perspective to broaden understanding of the effects of table shape on collaboration when different group sizes and genders are considered. On-task actions such as explanation, discussion, non-verbal interaction, and interaction with physical artefacts were observed while students were engaged in engineering design tasks. Results suggest that table shape influences student behaviour when taking into account different group sizes and different genders.

The role of Bachelor’s Final Projects (BFP) in Engineering Education is critical since it offers the opportunity for students to integrate and employ specific and transversal competences they have developed along the degree. However, given the special characteristics of this curriculum component (personalized according to the student’s interests, the number of teachers involved, the changing assessment boards, etc.), the systematization of its formative and summative assessment has been extensively recognized as problematic but highly necessary. To face this problem, there are several recent initiatives reported in the literature that propose a set of rubrics as tools for project advisors and board members to structure the assessment. In this paper, we report the experience in the Engineering School at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) employing a rubricbased approach as part of an assessment guide (with a web-based support tool) for BFP. The guide has been evaluated using quantitative and qualitative data gathering techniques used before, during and after the rubrics use, and the results provide insights about its utility, pertinence, user-friendliness, preciseness and actual adoption. Findings led to the provision an additional feature in the web-based tool for the integrated assessment of transversal and specific competences and a view of a summarized version of the rubrics that can be used using mobile devices.

This paper presents and compares a variety of approaches that have been developed to guide the decision-making process in learning design. Together with the companion Learning Design Rashomon II (Prieto et al., 2013), devoted to existing tools to support the same process, it aims to provide a view on relevant research results in this field. The common thread followed in these two contributions is inspired by Kurosawa's Rashomon film, which takes multiple perspectives on the same action. Similarly, in this paper, Rashomon I, a lesson on “Healthy Eating” is analysed according to five different approaches, while the Rashomon II paper is used to exemplify the affordances of different tools. For this reason, this paper does not follow the conventional structure of research papers (research question, method, results and discussion), but rather it moves from an introduction providing the rationale for the paper, to a description of the five different approaches to learning design (the 4SPPIces Model, the 4Ts, the e-Design Template, the Design Principles Database and the Design Narrative) and then to a discussion of their similarities and differences to inform the choice of potential users.

A new generation of public displays demands high interactive and multiscreen features to enrich people’s experience in new pervasive environments. Traditionally, research on public display interaction has involved mobile devices as the main characters during the use of personal area network technologies such as Bluetooth or NFC. However, the emergent Smart TV model arises as an interesting alternative for the implementation of a new generation of public displays. This is due to its intrinsic connection capabilities with surrounding devices like smartphones or tablets. Nonetheless, the different approaches proposed by the most important vendors are still underdeveloped to support multiscreen and interaction capabilities for modern public displays, because most of them are intended for domestic environments. This research proposes multiscreen interactive middleware for public displays, which was developed from the principles of a loosely coupled interaction model, simplicity, stability, concurrency, low latency, and the usage of open standards and technologies. Moreover, a validation prototype is proposed in one of the most interesting public display scenarios: the advertising.

This paper leverages analytics methods to investigate the impact of changes in teaching modalities shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic on undergraduate students' satisfaction within a Spanish brick-and-mortar higher education institution. Unlike research that has focused on faculty- or programme-level data, this study offers a comprehensive institutional perspective by analysing large-scale data (N = 83,532) gathered from satisfaction surveys across all undergraduate courses in eight faculties from 2018 to 2021. The longitudinal analysis revealed significant changes (p < 0.05) in satisfaction indicators, particularly overall satisfaction and perceived workload. During the emergency remote teaching period, there was a significant decrease in satisfaction and high levels of variability across courses. However, a year after emergency remote teaching, with increased implementations of technology-supported online and mixed teaching modalities, satisfaction measures not only recovered but exceeded pre-COVID levels in the aforementioned indicators when the teaching modality was fully co-located. The variability of answers also reached historical lows, reflecting more uniform student experiences. These findings highlight the resilience of educators and the current higher education system and suggest a capacity to learn and improve from disruptive pedagogical changes. The study also provides insights into how data analytics can help monitor and inform the evolution of teaching practices.