What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

This chapter presents an analysis of recommender systems in Technology-Enhanced Learning along their 15 years existence (2000–2014). All recommender systems considered for the review aim to support educational stakeholders by personalising the learning process. In this meta-review 82 recommender systems from 35 different countries have been investigated and categorised according to a given classification framework. The reviewed systems have been classified into seven clusters according to their characteristics and analysed for their contribution to the evolution of the RecSysTEL research field. Current challenges have been identified to lead the work of the forthcoming years.

Panorama of Recommender Systems to Support Learning

While Augmented Reality (AR) is increasingly being implemented across a number of industry sectors, an open issue remains over the emotional as well as experiential impacts of this new technology w...

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User experience model for augmented reality applications in urban heritage tourism

In addition to being a well-liked form of recreation, escape rooms have drawn the attention of educators due to their ability to foster teamwork, leadership, creative thinking, and communication in a way that is engaging for students. As a consequence, educational escape rooms are emerging as a new type of learning activity under the promise of enhancing students' learning through highly engaging experiences. These activities consist of escape rooms that incorporate course materials within their puzzles in such a way that students are required to master these materials in order to succeed. Although several studies have reported on the use of escape rooms in a wide range of disciplines, prior research falls short of addressing the use of educational escape rooms for teaching programming, one of the most valuable skills of the twenty-first century that students often have difficulties grasping. This paper reports on the use of an educational escape room in a programming course at a higher education institution and provide, for the first time, insights on the instructional effectiveness of using educational escape rooms for teaching programming. The results of this paper show that appropriate use of educational escape rooms can have significant positive impacts on student engagement and learning in programming courses. These results also suggest that students prefer these activities over traditional computer laboratory sessions. Finally, another novel contribution of this paper is a set of recommendations and proposals for educators in order to help them create effective educational escape rooms for teaching programming.

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Examining the Use of an Educational Escape Room for Teaching Programming in a Higher Education Setting

Escape education: A systematic review on escape rooms in education

The area of mobile city guides has grown really fast in the last years based on new mobile capabilities. This growth has been fostered by the evolution of ubiquitous systems and the great penetration of smartphones in the society. In this paper we propose a generic model to support a new way of visiting the city: instead of as a place for tourism, we see it as a place for learning in which located educational resources are available for end users. The model has been conceived as a way to encourage them to create their own educational tours, in which Learning Points Of Interest are set up to be discovered. Two main use cases are supported by the model: formal (conducted by a teacher) and informal (no educator is related to the learning experience) outdoor mobile learning. Details about the impact of the conjunction of tourism, learning and gamification dimensions in the model design, as well as about the model itself are provided. Finally, a mobile application prototype developed in the context of the FI-CONTENT European project is presented as a proof of concept of the model.

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The city as a learning gamified platform

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.

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Analyzing Learning Effectiveness and Students’ Perceptions of an Educational Escape Room in a Programming Course in Higher Education

Education can take advantage of e-Infrastructures to provide teachers with new opportunities to increase students' motivation and engagement while they learn. Nevertheless, teachers need to find, integrate and customize the resources provided by e-Infrastructures in an easy way. This paper presents ViSH Editor, an innovative web-based e-Learning authoring tool that aims to allow teachers to create new learning objects using e-Infrastructure resources. These new learning objects are called Virtual Excursions and are created as reusable, granular and interoperable learning objects. This way they can be reused to build new ones and they can be integrated in websites or Learning Management Systems. Details about the design, development and the tool itself are explained in this paper as well as the concept, structure and metadata of the new learning objects. Lastly, some real examples of how to enrich learning using Virtual Excursions are exposed.

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An online e-Learning authoring tool to create interactive multi-device learning objects using e-Infrastructure resources

Despite the efforts made, there is still an alarming difference between the digital competence that teachers have and the one they should have in order to develop their students' digital competence. The lack of teacher training in safe and responsible use of ICT is a special cause for concern. Online courses in MOOC format meet all the required conditions to offer a possible solution to the unavoidable and urgent need for initial and in-service teacher training in this area of digital competence. However, there is currently no evidence in the literature on the effectiveness of these courses for this purpose. This study examines the instructional effectiveness of courses in MOOC format for teacher training in the safe and responsible use of ICT by analysing three different official courses. The courses were analysed using three different methods: a questionnaire to measure participants’ perceptions, pre-tests and post-tests to measure the knowledge acquired, and LORI (Learning Object Review Instrument) to measure the quality of digital educational resources created by the participants. The results suggest that online courses in MOOC format are an effective way to train teachers in the safe and responsible use of ICT, and that these courses can enable the development of digital competence in the area of content creation.

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Aldo Gordillo

Papers

Examining the Use of an Educational Escape Room for Teaching Programming in a Higher Education Setting

The city as a learning gamified platform

Analyzing Learning Effectiveness and Students’ Perceptions of an Educational Escape Room in a Programming Course in Higher Education

An online e-Learning authoring tool to create interactive multi-device learning objects using e-Infrastructure resources

Efectividad de los MOOC para docentes en el uso seguro de las TIC