Search

This article focuses on the methodology applied for the review of European educational projects, within the framework of Erasmus+, labelled as good practices and that are related to electronic learning or the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education. In addition, some of the projects that have passed all the research phases and have proven to be sustainable over time are analyzed. The projects presented represent different educational sectors and propose learning systems through ICT with the involvement of students and/or teachers. As they are good practice projects, the article can contribute both to the use or transfer of the resources developed in these projects, and to be able to inspire new projects in those lines of work. The main factors that have contributed to the success of the projects are their usefulness for the educational community beyond the time of funding, the use of innovative methodologies applied with teachers and students, establishing them in the participating institutions. Another notable fact is the good collaboration and rapport between all the project partners who worked to get common objectives.

Test-driven development (TDD) is an agile practice of writing test code before production code, following three stages: red, green, and refactor. In the red stage, the test code is written; in the green stage, the minimum code necessary to make the test pass is implemented, and in the refactor stage, improvements are made to the code. This practice is widespread across the industry, and various studies have been conducted to understand its benefits and impacts on the software development process. Despite its popularity, TDD studies often focus on the technical aspects of the practice, such as the external/internal quality of the code, productivity, test smells, and code comprehension, rather than the context in which it is practiced. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review using Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar that focuses on the TDD practice and the influences that lead to the introduction of test smells/anti-patterns in the test code. The findings suggest that organizational structure influences the testing strategy. Additionally, there is a tendency to use test smells and TDD anti-patterns interchangeably, and test smells negatively impact code comprehension. Furthermore, TDD styles and the relationship between TDD practice and the generation of test smells are frequently overlooked in the literature.

Objectives: This work presents the application of meta-modeling to the data visualization and dashboards' domain to obtain two main products: a system that allows the instantiation of the meta-model through a graphical interface and a code generator that takes the instantiation of the meta-model as an input to generate visualizations and dashboards. Methods: A domain engineering approach complemented with an example-driven methodology was iteratively employed to develop the dashboard meta-model. This meta-model was subsequently used as an input to implement a code generator of information dashboards. These two artifacts were finally combined to design and develop the architecture of MetaViz. Results: Through this process, it was possible to generate visualizations and dashboards using visual elements and basic interactions. MetaViz allows the generation of basic charts (line charts, scatter plots, pie charts, etc.) as well as more complex displays with interactive behavior along different views, layouts, and operations. Conclusions: The development of MetaViz has served as proof of the viability and benefits of applying these methodologies to a complex domain, but also to set the foundations of a system that allows users to trace every single element from a data visualization to its most primitive values.

Teamwork is one of the most demanded generic competencies by international organizations, and higher education institutions train and assess that competence to prepare students for working life. Leadership is a crucial part of teamwork development, and previous research has shown that shared leadership tasks between team members present more advantages than the traditional concept of a formal leader. Shared leadership seems to be the best option in the academic context due to the university students’ characteristics. This paper aims to prove that students can identify, distinguish and exercise shared leadership actions based on the needs that arise during the development of teamwork and that derive from the teamwork method applied rather than by the training modality that is followed (face-to-face – online). The achievement of the aim has been possible through a qualitative study of the teamwork development of 40 teams of new university entrance (237 students) with the Comprehensive Teamwork Competency Formation Model. The research has been carried out during three consecutive academic courses, with different training modalities for each course, forced by the COVID-19 pandemic (face-to-face for the pre-COVID-19 course, online for the COVID-19 course and face-to-face during the post-COVID-19 course). The shared leadership tasks and responsibilities, defined by students, were categorized in the same way independently of the training modality, which validates the proposed ontology. Also, the three academic courses studied the evolution of the primary shared leadership responsibilities by category. Besides, it is concluded that the primary responsibilities for each category remained unchanged during the three academic years but that some other categories were affected to some extent by the exceptionality caused by COVID-19. The ontology validated here constitutes a recommendation for future teams working with an evidence-based methodology.

Machine Learning allows facing complex tasks related to data analysis with big datasets. This Artificial Intelligence branch allows not technical contexts to get benefits related to data processing and analysis. In particular, in medicine, medical professionals are increasingly interested in Machine Learning to identify patterns in clinical cases and make predictions regarding health issues. However, many do not have the necessary programming or technological skills to perform these tasks. Many different tools focus on developing Machine Learning pipelines, from libraries for developers and data scientists to visual tools for experts or platforms to learn. However, we have identified some requirements in the medical context that raise the need to create a customized platform adapted to end-user found in this context. This work describes the design process and the first version of KoopaML, an ML platform to bridge the data science gaps of physicians while automatizing Machine Learning pipelines. The platform is focused on enhanced interactivity to improve the engagement of physicians while still providing all the benefits derived from the introduction of Machine Learning pipelines in medical departments, as well as integrated ongoing training during the use of the tool’s features.

Open Education (OE) opens up learning opportunities to, potentially, every person in the world. Additionally, it allows teachers, researchers, and practitioners to find, share, reuse, and improve existing resources under a dependable legal framework. Aiming to spread and foster the introduction of open policies in Higher Education (HE) institutions, the gamified interactive learning experience Catch the Open! was developed. Catch the Open! targets HE educators who wish to learn, or who wish to deepen their existing knowledge, about OE and Open Educational Practices (OEP). Within the gamified learning experience, the user becomes an educator, Alex, the game character, who receives a task from the Rector: to investigate how to best include OE and OEP in teaching and learning practice within the institution. Alex proceeds to explore and gather information in a web-based 2D virtual HE institution where students, colleagues, and guest researchers will help her to develop a comprehensive understanding of OE and the practical application of OEP. The educational content within Catch the Open! is underpinned by an OE competences framework for HE educators, developed in a previous phase of the Erasmus+ OpenGame project. In this paper, the design process to link pedagogical and technological approaches, which results in the Catch the Open! gamified web-based interactive application, is presented as well as the application itself. Moreover, two phases of piloting with 153 HE educators from six different HE institutions are presented. The obtained findings showed that the gamified environment helped in learning about OE. On the other hand, learners also suggested several improvement aspects of the gamified environment, such as the length of finishing a learning mission while playing.

Nowadays, according to the intention of many hospitals and medical centers to computerize their processes and medical treatments, including data forms and medical images, which are generating a considerable amount of data, IT specialists and data scientists who are oriented to eHealth and related issues know the importance of data integration and its benefits. This study indicates the significance of data integration, especially in medical information systems. It means that the medical subsystems in the HIS (hospital information system) must be integrated, and it is also necessary to unify with the MIS (management information system). In this paper, the accuracy level of the extracted reports from the information system (to evaluate the staff’s performance) will be measured in two ways: (1) At first, the performance of the clinic reception staff will be evaluated. In this way, the personnel attendance system is an independent and separate software, and the mentioned evaluation has been performed by its report. (2) The following year, in the same location, the same evaluation has been performed based on the data extracted from the personnel attendance subsystem, which has been added to the medical information system as an integrated information system. After comparing the accuracy level of both ways, this paper concludes that when the personnel attendance subsystem as a part of the MIS has been unified with the HIS, the reports and, consequently, management decisions will be more accurate; therefore, the managers and decision-makers will perceive the importance of data integration more than in the past.

Although STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) and student-centered instruction are growing rapidly in popularity, their reach is not adequately distributed across diversity groups (including individuals of different genders, economic backgrounds, immigrant backgrounds, abilities, and races, among other characteristics). The CreaSTEAM project intends to address diversity gaps by developing STEAM-Labs, student-centered spaces that combine components of fab labs, media labs, and user labs to specifically target diversity gaps. This paper carried out an informal PRISMA systematic review of a collection of 124 worldwide STEAM diversity initiatives to gather data on existing best practices that will be used in the STEAM-Labs. The review studied the geographic distributions, organizational structures, founding years, and activity offerings of the initiatives, along with the dataset’s overall STEAM content area prevalence and diversity target area prevalence. STEM was the most common approach, and gender was the most common diversity target area. Since 2010 initiative creation has increased, with most growth in gender-focused initiatives.

Recently, in an interview with employers of a university master’s degree, the importance they gave to transversal competences for these graduates was highlighted. In the Barometer of university employability and employment (2017 Master Edition), presented in February 2018, the vision that the graduates had about the importance of these competences and the level they received in these university degrees was underlined. In this article we will reflect on this important aspect regarding the employment of university students and the role that the University should play about it.

En los últimos años, el fomento de la empleabilidad y la adquisición de competencias se ha convertido en una de las prioridades de las universidades en el marco del Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior. Esto ha supuesto un nuevo impulso para afrontar las crecientes dificultades relacionadas con la inserción laboral de los titulados y los desajustes entre la formación recibida y los requisitos de los puestos de trabajo. En el nuevo paradigma educativo, las competencias se han convertido en la referencia a partir de la cual se organiza, planifica y evalúa el aprendizaje, y las agencias de calidad encargadas de evaluar los planes de estudio han introducido nuevos criterios ligados a la empleabilidad y la inserción laboral. Sin embargo, en España la información sobre muchos de estos temas es insuficiente, especialmente en cuanto a las competencias que se necesitan a lo largo de la vida laboral y la aportación de la universidad en su adquisición, los factores que determinan el acceso al empleo y la estabilidad laboral, la satisfacción con el trabajo y con la formación recibida, la idoneidad de las metodologías educativas utilizadas, o los desajustes entre la educación y el empleo. Con esta finalidad, en el año 2012 se creó el Observatorio de Empleabilidad y Empleo Universitarios. El objetivo de este artículo es la presentación de los resultados de esta iniciativa sistémica de política universitaria encaminada al seguimiento y a la medición de la empleabilidad y el empleo de los universitarios en España.

User experience with intuitive and flexible digital platforms can be enjoyable and satisfying. A strategy to deliver such an experience is to place the users at the center of the design process and analyze their beliefs and perceptions to add appropriate platform features. This study conducted with focus groups as a qualitative method of data collection to investigate users’ preferences and develop a new landing page for institutional repositories with attractive functionalities based on their information-structural rules. The research question was: What are the motivations and experiences of users in an academic community when publishing scientific information in an institutional repository? The focus group technique used in this study had three sessions. Results showed that 50% of the participants did not know the functionalities of the institutional repository nor its benefits. Users’ perceptions of platforms such as ResearchGate or Google Scholar that provide academic production were also identified. The findings showed that motivating an academic community to use an institutional repository requires technological functions, user guidelines that identify what can or cannot be published in open access, and training programs for open access publication practices and institutional repository use. These measures align with global strategies to strengthen the digital identities of scientific communities and thus benefit open science.

WYRED (netWorked Youth Research for Empowerment in the Digital society) European H2020 project was born with the aim of knowing better what young people think, giving them the opportunity of rising their voices, about the technology influence in every aspect of their daily living. Currently, this project is near to finish its first year, building a different Social Sciences research approach, with a focus more oriented to open science related areas such as crowd science, citizen science, or network-connected science.

Mobile technologies constitute a didactic resource with great potential. However, their incorporation process to the classroom is not being implemented in a satisfying way. The future teachers will play a key role in the integration process of these technologies’ integration process in formal education contexts and, therefore, it is essential to know the factors that condition their decision-making process.This article presents the results of a research which analyzes the influence of motivational factors on the behavioral intention to use mobile technologies in the future teaching practice of the students from the Pre-primary Education Degree from the University of Salamanca. With this purpose, we have developed a TAM-based technology adoption model including the following constructs: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived enjoyment, resistance to change and behavioral intention. The employed PLS-SEM analysis confirms the validity and reliability of the model. The results of the analysis of the structural model reflect the importance of perceived enjoyment and perceived usefulness in the adoption process, as well as the low relevance of perceived ease of use. In total, the motivational factors enable the prediction of a high percentage of the variance of behavioral intention, which reveals the need to design educational programmes that emphasize on these elements.

It is a real fact that mobile devices, specially smartphones, and Internet have substantially changed the customs of the population, the social habits, the communication media, and, ultimately, the way of life of people. Inevitably, although with different barriers and with more time that many studies and reports estimated, mobility has arrived to the educational context, with different intensity, penetration and usage in formal and non-formal education, and in a full way into the informal learning. Mobile device is called to revolutionize the educational practices due to it introduces some degrees of freedom that other previous technologies had not offered. The power of ubiquitous connectivity and the possibilities of having access to the knowledge sources in a pocket device, such as mobile phone, or with a size as a notebook, in the case of tablets, and also equipped with a processing capacity higher than that of personal computers a few years ago, pose disruptive scenarios in educational methodologies based on technology and support eLearning as a natural option both as a complement or as a main educational model. However, this idyllic vision has a different degree of acceptance according to the educational level, the disciplinary area and the formality of the formative action. Therefore, large-scale research studies are needed to convey the degree of advancement, effective use, acceptance and penetration of mobile technologies in education and learning. This is the reason for this special issue at the Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia (RIED), which consists of 13 articles selected after a rigorous peer review of the more than 35 proposals received.

Engineering education has solid needs of experimental competences development. Nowadays theses competences can be developed not only in traditional laboratories (hands on) but also through the use of computer simulations and remote labs. The use of diversified methods in education and the exploration of new resources and techniques in classroom may allow teachers to motivate more students, and capture their attention due to their different learning styles.The main objective of this thesis project is to better understand the effects on the students’ learning outcomes in different contexts, when subject to similar design approaches using an enquiry-based teaching and learning methodology based on simultaneous use of experimental resources (hands on, simulation and remote labs) together with calculus, in class and assessment. To accomplish this goal, several insights must be taken into consideration, including the teachers’ mediation in each case and the didactical implementations adaptations, but also external factors, such as socio-cultural and/or political factors.

The first editorial of EKS volume 18 retakes a recurrent theme in this journal: the Open Access, in this case to reflect on some of the myths that are still very ingrained in the scientific community.

Las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación están en el aula, con diferente penetración, aceptación y presencia. La docencia virtual ha sido la máxima representación del uso docente de la tecnología, pero en la docencia presencial la tecnología se veía como un complemento más que como una verdadera herramienta de cambio metodológico. Sin embargo, se están dando las circunstancias para que este cambio se produzca. El éxito de modelos de inversión de la clase, la semi presencialidad y en especial los dispositivos móviles son los principales motores de e ste cambio. No obstante, la competencia digital de los profesores actuales y futuros es clave para que la tecnología en el aula se consolide pedagógicamente. Este número monográfico profundiza en esta cu estión con s eis artículos que abordan el uso de la tecnología en el aula desde diferentes perspectivas para cambiar, desde un punto de vista pedagógico, la relación entre profesor y estudiante sin olvidar las competencias digitales del profesorado.

Data are crucial to improve decision-making and obtain greater benefits in any type of activity. However, the large amount of information generated by new technologies has made data analysis and knowledge generation a complex task. Numerous tools have emerged to facilitate this generation of knowledge, such as dashboards. Although dashboards are useful tools, their effectiveness can be affected by poor design or by not taking into account the context in which they are placed. Therefore, it is necessary to design and create custom dashboards according to the audience and data domain. This paper presents an application of the software product line paradigm and the integration of this approach into a web service to allow users to request source code for customized information dashboards. The main goal is to introduce the idea of creating a holistic ecosystem of different services to craft and integrate information visualizations in a variety of contexts. One of the contexts that can be especially favored by this approach is the educational context, where learning analytics, data analysis of student performance, and didactic tools are becoming very relevant. Three different use cases of this approach are presented to illustrate the benefits of the developed generative service.

Active educational methodologies promote students to take an active role in their own learning, enhance cooperative work, and develop a collective understanding of the subject as a common learning area. Cloud Computing enables the learning space to be supported while also revolutionizing it by allowing it to be used as a link between active methodology and students’ learning activities. A Cloud Computing system is used in conjunction with an active methodology to recognize and manage individual, group, and collective evidence of the students’ work in this research. The key hypothesis shown in this work is that if evidence management is made clear and evidence is consistently and gradually presented to students, their level of involvement will increase, and their learning outcomes will improve. The model was implemented in a university subject of a first academic year using the active Flipped Classroom methodology, and the individual, group and collective evidence is constantly worked with throughout the implementation of a teamwork method.

Obesity is one of the biggest health problems globally that, together with sedentarism, requires solutions that increase the enthusiasm towards physical activity. Therefore, this paper describes two solutions based on active games using the Kinect sensor and biometric sensors, designed for the outpatient treatment of childhood obesity. The solutions were applied in an intervention program based on active video games and motor games, developed with children in treatment for childhood obesity. An ad hoc questionnaire was used to assess the level of satisfaction, fun, learning, and behavior changes in the children of the experimental group that developed the intervention. The results showed a high index of satisfaction with the intervention program, as well as with the games developed. It is concluded that active video games and group games are highly motivating and can promote behavior change towards healthier life habits in children.

The editorial of this second issue of volume 17,corresponding to 2016, is devoted to socialization process in the knowledge management in order to complement the special section about Social Networks and Education.

La iniciativa Semester of Code organiza prácticas virtuales para estudiantes universitarios de toda Europa, trabajando en problemas reales de empresas que emplean software de código abierto en sus procesos de negocio. El proyecto fue bienvenido por todos actores involucrados, entre los que se encuentran varias empresas y fundaciones relacionadas con el software libre. Sin embargo, la respuesta por parte de los estudiantes fue menor de lo esperado. En este artículo se examinan las razones de ello, se discuten los resultados de la evaluación que se ha llevado a cabo. Finalmente, se reflexiona sobre las implicaciones del trabajo realizado para las prácticas en empresas de los estudiantes y el Programa Knowledge Alliance de la Unión Europea.

The editorial of this first issue of volume 17, corresponding to 2016, is devoted to the university-business-society relationships that is usually known as Third Mission of the University or the knowledge transfer mission.

Artificial intelligence applied to the educational field has a vast potential, especially after the effects worldwide of the COVID-19 pandemic. Online or blended educational modes are needed to respond to the health situation we are living in. The tutorial effort is higher than in the traditional face-to-face approach. Thus, educational systems are claiming smarter learning technologies that do not pretend to substitute the faculty but make their teaching activities easy. This Special Issue is oriented to present a collection of papers of original advances in educational applications and services propelled by artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, and deep learning.

Knowledge management is one of the key priorities of many organizations. They face different challenges in the implementation of knowledge management processes, including the transformation of tacit knowledge—experience, skills, insights, intuition, judgment and know-how—into explicit knowledge. Furthermore, the increasing number of information sources and services in some domains, such as healthcare, increase the amount of information available. Therefore, there is a need to transform that information in knowledge. In this context, learning ecosystems emerge as solutions to support knowledge management in a different context. On the other hand, the dashboards enable the generation of knowledge through the exploitation of the data provided from different sources. The model-driven development of these solutions is possible through two meta-models developed in previous works. Even though those meta-models solve several problems, the learning ecosystem meta-model has a lack of decision-making support. In this context, this work provides two main contributions to face this issue. First, the definition of a holistic meta-model to support decision-making processes in ecosystems focused on knowledge management, also called learning ecosystems. The second contribution of this work is an instantiation of the presented holistic meta-model in the healthcare domain.

The visualization of medical images with advanced techniques, such as augmented reality and virtual reality, represent a breakthrough for medical professionals. In contrast to more traditional visualization tools lacking 3D capabilities, these systems use the three available dimensions. To visualize medical images in 3D, the anatomical areas of interest must be segmented. Currently, manual segmentation, which is the most commonly used technique, and semi-automatic approaches can be time consuming because a doctor is required, making segmentation for each individual case unfeasible. Using new technologies, such as computer vision and artificial intelligence for segmentation algorithms and augmented and virtual reality for visualization techniques implementation, we designed a complete platform to solve this problem and allow medical professionals to work more frequently with anatomical 3D models obtained from medical imaging. As a result, the Nextmed project, due to the different implemented software applications, permits the importation of digital imaging and communication on medicine (dicom) images on a secure cloud platform and the automatic segmentation of certain anatomical structures with new algorithms that improve upon the current research results. A 3D mesh of the segmented structure is then automatically generated that can be printed in 3D or visualized using both augmented and virtual reality, with the designed software systems. The Nextmed project is unique, as it covers the whole process from uploading dicom images to automatic segmentation, 3D reconstruction, 3D visualization, and manipulation using augmented and virtual reality. There are many researches about application of augmented and virtual reality for medical image 3D visualization; however, they are not automated platforms. Although some other anatomical structures can be studied, we focused on one case: a lung study. Analyzing the application of the platform to more than 1000 dicom images and studying the results with medical specialists, we concluded that the installation of this system in hospitals would provide a considerable improvement as a tool for medical image visualization.

Information dashboards are everywhere. They support knowledge discovery in a huge variety of contexts and domains. Although powerful, these tools can be complex, not only for the end-users but also for developers and designers. Information dashboards encode complex datasets into different visual marks to ease knowledge discovery. Choosing a wrong design could compromise the entire dashboard’s effectiveness, selecting the appropriate encoding or configuration for each potential context, user, or data domain is a crucial task. For these reasons, there is a necessity to automatize the recommendation of visualizations and dashboard configurations to deliver tools adapted to their context. Recommendations can be based on different aspects, such as user characteristics, the data domain, or the goals and tasks that will be achieved or carried out through the visualizations. This work presents a dashboard meta-model that abstracts all these factors and the integration of a visualization task taxonomy to account for the different actions that can be performed with information dashboards. This meta-model has been used to design a domain specific language to specify dashboards requirements in a structured way. The ultimate goal is to obtain a dashboard generation pipeline to deliver dashboards adapted to any context, such as the educational context, in which a lot of data are generated, and there are several actors involved (students, teachers, managers, etc.) that would want to reach different insights regarding their learning performance or learning methodologies.

The continuous advances in technology cause innovation-acceptation-consolidationobsolescence flows regarding the knowledge and technology management strategies, both ad hoc and planned, of the corporations and also, in a different scale, of the individuals. Teaching and learning processes are not obviously unaware of this situation. The irruption of Information and Communication Technologies as educational tools mean both a conceptual and a methodological turning point in the way that institutions, educational or not, face training processes and learning management, especially with regard to the concept of distance education, which evolves, in a more or less significant way, when it adopts Internet as media; that is how the eLearning concept rises. However, from the first eLearning experiences, too much settled on the concept of platform or Learning Management System, up to the present times, there have been significant changes, again in both technological and methodological levels. It is important to underline, among others, the influence of social media in the daily habits of users. This way, an increased demand of learning personalization it is shown, as so as a complete connectivity with other peers, an unlimited access to resources and information sources, a complete flexibility in the way, place and time they access, and a natural and necessary coexistence of both formal and informal learning flows. Thus, the “traditional” eLearning platforms, despite their large penetration and consolidation, need to evolve and open themselves to support this rich fan of possibilities demanded by the users, ceasing to be the centre technological attention to become another component into a complex digital ecosystem oriented to the learning and knowledge management, both at institutional and personal levels. It is therefore necessary to make an updated review of the eLearning concept and its definitions that have been provided from the experience and perspective of our research group GRIAL (Research Group in InterAction and eLearning), coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the “Current status of e-learning systems” paper.

El desarrollo de las nuevas tecnologías y el interés en la aplicación de las mismas al proceso de enseñanza aprendizaje han provocado el nacimiento de nuevas metodologías didácticas que pretenden sacar el máximo partido a los dispositivos. Una de las que más fuerza ha cobrado en los últimos años es el mobile learning. Nuestra intención con este artículo es describir las características principales de esta metodología, centrándonos especialmente en las implicaciones pedagógicas que trae consigo y la situación actual de la investigación en este campo, especialmente en España y en Europa.El artículo está dividido en cuatro secciones. En primer lugar, definiremos el concepto de mobile learning y su relación con los ámbitos de enseñanza. En segundo lugar, pasaremos a describir las posibilidades didácticas de los terminales móviles, centrándonos especialmente en los más populares en la actualidad, smartphones y tabletas, que han supuesto un importante avance en este campo. En tercer lugar, profundizaremos en los criterios pedagógicos para el desarrollo de actividades mLearning en los distintos paradigmas y contextos educativos, así como las estrategias de formación del profesorado. Por último, presentaremos las principales líneas de investigación y tendencias actuales y describiremos la situación en los territorios mencionados anteriormente.

Informal caregivers play an important role in healthcare systems in many countries. They have a high impact on reducing care costs related to dependent persons because their support prevents institutionalization. A technological ecosystem has been defined to support informal caregivers using psychoeducation techniques. This ecosystem should include a dashboard to support decision-making processes related to the wellbeing of patients and caregivers. A dashboard meta-model was used to obtain a concrete model for the presented context. This meta-model allows defining dashboards adapted to the users’ needs and specific data domains.

Business interactions are rarely taken into account in the early stages of development of software ecosystems in the health sector, which causes these kinds of solutions to stay as conceptual proposals or be rapidly discontinued after deployment. In the present paper, we describe our approach towards the exploitation of a technological ecosystem focused on learning and knowledge management processes to develop and enhance the caregiving competences of formal and informal caregivers, both at home and in care environments. The definition of the business process has been done using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard, which allows to further include the business model in the definition of the data taxonomy.

Today, the population uses technology for every daily activity involving business, education, communication, entertainment, etc. Technology may also help us to take care of people who suffer some kind of disability. Complex technological ecosystems with pervasive and intelligent capabilities get along with us, facilitating the vigilance of those who need special attention or assisted living cares due to their health limitations. The advances in sensor research have enriched the powerful of these ecosystems to achieve more sophisticated monitoring and alarm systems, also taking into account the balance between the level of assistance and the people’s privacy. The Special Issue on “Sensor Technologies for Caring People with Disabilities” aims to present recent developments on sensor technologies for caring people with disabilities, focusing on the different configurations that can be used and novel applications in the field.

Applying the concepts of technological ecosystems to the care and assistance domain is an emerging field that has gained interest during the last years, as they allow to describe the complex relationships between actors in a technologically boosted care domain. In that context, this paper presents a systematic review and mapping of the literature to identify, analyse and classify the published research carried out to provide care and assistance services under a technological ecosystems’ perspective. Thirty-seven papers were identified in the literature as relevant and analysed in detail (between 2003⁻2018). The main findings show that it is indeed an emerging field, as few of the found ecosystem proposals have been developed in the real world nor have they been tested with real users. In addition, a lot of research to date reports the proposal of platform-centric architectures developed over existing platforms not specifically developed for care and services provision. Employed sensor technologies for providing services have very diverse natures depending on the intended services to be provided. However, many of these technologies do not take into account medical standards. The degree of the ecosystems’ openness to adding new devices greatly depends on the approach followed, such as the type of middleware considered. Thus, there is still much work to be done in order to equate other more established ecosystems such as business or software ecosystems.

Each day the impact of the information society on all the aspects of our daily lives is becoming more evident. In this sense it may also entail changes in educational techniques, especially in the classic mentality of teaching. Exploring new techniques, methods and tools is a challenge for educators in their attempt to take advantage of these technologies. This article presents a proposal for the creation and configuration of virtual education spaces on the basis of a series of educational software components addressed, on the one hand, to strengthening the teacher's creativity and, on the other, to opening doors to teaching activities on the net, which will complement the classic teaching activities carried out in the classroom. This proposal receives the name Enclave.