Contribución al diseño y modelado de plataformas de gestión e impartición de titulaciones conjuntas en ambientes de e-learning

Las Tecnologías de la Información y de las Comunicaciones, ofrecen una buena oportunidad para el desarrollo de comunidades virtuales de aprendizaje, especialmente en el caso de las titulaciones conjuntas entre organizaciones. Estas comunidades permiten a las organizaciones aprovechar mejor las oportunidades de aprendizaje que brindan las tecnologías de Internet, aportando mejores contenidos y experiencias de aprendizaje (Recursos de aprendizaje) tanto para los profesores como para los alumnos. Sin embargo, actualmente no existe una tecnología clara con la que poder federar plataformas de gestión e impartición de titulaciones virtuales (LMS), con la que dar un adecuado soporte a las titulaciones conjuntas. En este trabajo, se presenta una metodología y una arquitectura de federación de plataformas LMS para poder gestionar titulaciones conjuntas en ambiente de e-learning. Actualmente, existe escaso conocimiento acerca de los problemas que están imposibilitando la utilización de estos escenarios. Por ello, este trabajo se presenta como una solución para los miembros de la comunidad (directores, docentes, investigadores y estudiantes), ofreciendo un marco conceptual, que ayuda a entender estos escenarios e identifica los requisitos de diseño que son útiles para generar servicios de aprendizaje accesibles a los miembros de la comunidad (Grid de recursos de aprendizaje) y para integrar los LMS en una nube de titulaciones conjuntas en ambientes de e-learning. Así mismo, en el presente documento se presentan varias experiencias, en las que se han implementado comunidades virtuales de aprendizaje en la ciudad de Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), que han servido para inspirar y validar la solución propuesta en este trabajo. ABSTRACT Information and communication technologies offer a great opportunity for the development of virtual learning communities, like as joint degrees between Organizations. Virtual Learning Communities allow organizations to be more cooperative during training activities via the Internet, with the provision of their learning expertise (learning resource). Internet enables multiple organizations to share their learning expertise with others. In these cooperative knowledge spaces, each organization contributes with their partners providing learning resources that they offer to students and teachers. However, currently there is no clear technology with which to federate Learning Management Systems (LMS) to give adequate support to joint degrees. In this work, we present a description of the problems that would face the generation of the Joint degrees in e-learning environments. Currently little is known about the problems that prevent the formation of virtual learning communities generated from the experience contributed by multiple organizations, so, this work is important for community members (Directors, Teachers, Researchers and practitioners) because it offers a conceptual framework that helps understand these scenarios and can provide useful design requirements when generating learning services for the community (Grid of Learning Resources) and to integrate the LMS in a cloud of joint degrees in e-learning environments. We also propose various experiences in which virtual learning communities have been integrated in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) which have served to inspire and validate the solution proposed in this paper.

A Tele-Health Communication and Information System for Underserved Children in Rural Areas of Nicaragua

Millennium Development Goals point out the necessity of actively promoting maternal-child health care status, especially in underserved areas. This article details the development actions carried out between 2008 and 2011 in some rural communities of Nicaragua with the aim to provide a low-cost tele-health communication service. The service is managed by the health care center of Cusmapa, which leads the program and maintains a communication link between its health staff and the health brigades of 26 distant communities. Local agents can use the system to report urgent maternal-child health care episodes to be assessed through WiMAX-WiFi voice and data communications attended by two physicians and six nurses located at the health care center. The health and nutritional status of the maternal-child population can be monitored to prevent diseases, subnutrition, and deaths. The action approach assumes the fundamentals of appropriate technology and looks for community- based, sustainable, replicable, and scalable solutions to ensure future deployments according to the strategies of the United Nations.

Building sustainable capacity for health research in africa through cloud computing applications

Access to information and continuous education represent critical factors for physicians and researchers over the world. For African professionals, this situation is even more problematic due to the frequently difficult access to technological infrastructures and basic information. Both education and information technologies (e.g., including hardware, software or networking) are expensive and unaffordable for many African professionals. Thus, the use of e-learning and an open approach to information exchange and software use have been already proposed to improve medical informatics issues in Africa. In this context, the AFRICA BUILD project, supported by the European Commission, aims to develop a virtual platform to provide access to a wide range of biomedical informatics and learning resources to professionals and researchers in Africa. A consortium of four African and four European partners work together in this initiative. In this framework, we have developed a prototype of a cloud-computing infrastructure to demonstrate, as a proof of concept, the feasibility of this approach. We have conducted the experiment in two different locations in Africa: Burundi and Egypt. As shown in this paper, technologies such as cloud computing and the use of open source medical software for a large range of case present significant challenges and opportunities for developing countries, such as many in Africa.

Probabilistic meta-analysis of risk from the exposure to Hg in artisanal gold mining communities in Colombia

Colombia is one of the largest per capita mercury polluters in the world as a consequence of its artisanal gold mining activities. The severity of this problem in terms of potential health effects was evaluated by means of a probabilistic risk assessment carried out in the twelve departments (or provinces) in Colombia with the largest gold production. The two exposure pathways included in the risk assessment were inhalation of elemental Hg vapors and ingestion of fish contaminated with methyl mercury. Exposure parameters for the adult population (especially rates of fish consumption) were obtained from nation-wide surveys and concentrations of Hg in air and of methyl-mercury in fish were gathered from previous scientific studies. Fish consumption varied between departments and ranged from 0 to 0.3 kg d?1. Average concentrations of total mercury in fish (70 data) ranged from 0.026 to 3.3 lg g?1. A total of 550 individual measurements of Hg in workshop air (ranging from menor queDL to 1 mg m?3) and 261 measurements of Hg in outdoor air (ranging from menor queDL to 0.652 mg m?3) were used to generate the probability distributions used as concentration terms in the calculation of risk. All but two of the distributions of Hazard Quotients (HQ) associated with ingestion of Hg-contaminated fish for the twelve regions evaluated presented median values higher than the threshold value of 1 and the 95th percentiles ranged from 4 to 90. In the case of exposure to Hg vapors, minimum values of HQ for the general population exceeded 1 in all the towns included in this study, and the HQs for miner-smelters burning the amalgam is two orders of magnitude higher, reaching values of 200 for the 95th percentile. Even acknowledging the conservative assumptions included in the risk assessment and the uncertainties associated with it, its results clearly reveal the exorbitant levels of risk endured not only by miner-smelters but also by the general population of artisanal gold mining communities in Colombia.

Sistema de recomendación semántico para la movilidad en el entorno AFRICA BUILD Portal

La Gestión de Recursos Humanos a través de Internet es un problema latente y presente actualmente en cualquier sitio web dedicado a la búsqueda de empleo. Este problema también está presente en AFRICA BUILD Portal. AFRICA BUILD Portal es una emergente red socio-profesional nacida con el ánimo de crear comunidades virtuales que fomenten la educación e investigación en el área de la salud en países africanos. Uno de los métodos para fomentar la educación e investigación es mediante la movilidad de estudiantes e investigadores entre instituciones, apareciendo así, el citado problema de la gestión de recursos humanos. Por tanto, este trabajo se centra en solventar el problema de la gestión de recursos humanos en el entorno específico de AFRICA BUILD Portal. Para solventar este problema, el objetivo es desarrollar un sistema de recomendación que ayude en la gestión de recursos humanos en lo que concierne a la selección de las mejores ofertas y demandas de movilidad. Caracterizando al sistema de recomendación como un sistema semántico el cual ofrecerá las recomendaciones basándose en las reglas y restricciones impuestas por el dominio. La aproximación propuesta se basa en seguir el enfoque de los sistemas de Matchmaking semánticos. Siguiendo este enfoque, por un lado, se ha empleado un razonador de lógica descriptiva que ofrece inferencias útiles en el cálculo de las recomendaciones y por otro lado, herramientas de procesamiento de lenguaje natural para dar soporte al proceso de recomendación. Finalmente para la integración del sistema de recomendación con AFRICA BUILD Portal se han empleado diversas tecnologías web. Los resultados del sistema basados en la comparación de recomendaciones creadas por el sistema y por usuarios reales han mostrado un funcionamiento y rendimiento aceptable. Empleando medidas de evaluación de sistemas de recuperación de información se ha obtenido una precisión media del sistema de un 52%, cifra satisfactoria tratándose de un sistema semántico. Pudiendo concluir que con la solución implementada se ha construido un sistema estable y modular posibilitando: por un lado, una fácil evolución que debería ir encaminada a lograr un rendimiento mayor, incrementando su precisión y por otro lado, dejando abiertas nuevas vías de crecimiento orientadas a la explotación del potencial de AFRICA BUILD Portal mediante la Web 3.0. ---ABSTRACT---The Human Resource Management through Internet is currently a latent problem shown in any employment website. This problem has also appeared in AFRICA BUILD Portal. AFRICA BUILD Portal is an emerging socio-professional network with the objective of creating virtual communities to foster the capacity for health research and education in African countries. One way to foster this capacity of research and education is through the mobility of students and researches between institutions, thus appearing the Human Resource Management problem. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on solving the Human Resource Management problem in the specific environment of AFRICA BUILD Portal. To solve this problem, the objective is to develop a recommender system which assists the management of Human Resources with respect to the selection of the best mobility supplies and demands. The recommender system is a semantic system which will provide the recommendations according to the domain rules and restrictions. The proposed approach is based on semantic matchmaking solutions. So, this approach on the one hand uses a Description Logics reasoning engine which provides useful inferences to the recommendation process and on the other hand uses Natural Language Processing techniques to support the recommendation process. Finally, Web technologies are used in order to integrate the recommendation system into AFRICA BUILD Portal. The results of evaluating the system are based on the comparison between recommendations created by the system and by real users. These results have shown an acceptable behavior and performance. The average precision of the system has been obtained by evaluation measures for information retrieval systems, so the average precision of the system is at 52% which may be considered as a satisfactory result taking into account that the system is a semantic system. To conclude, it could be stated that the implemented system is stable and modular. This fact on the one hand allows an easy evolution that should aim to achieve a higher performance by increasing its average precision and on the other hand keeps open new ways to increase the functionality of the system oriented to exploit the potential of AFRICA BUILD Portal through Web 3.0.

Probabilistic assessment of risk from the exposure to mercury in artisanal gold mining communities in Colombia

Colombia is one the largest per capita mercury polluters as a consequence of its artisanal gold mining operations, which are steadily increasing following the rising price of this metal. Compared to gravimetric separation methods and cyanidation, the concentration of gold using Hg amalgams presents several advantages: the process is less time-consuming and minimizes gold losses, and Hg is easily transported and inexpensive relative to the selling price of gold. Very often, mercury amalgamation is carried out on site by unprotected workers. During this operation large amounts of mercury are discharged to the environment and eventually reach the fresh water bodies in the vicinity where it is subjected to methylation. Additionally, as gold is released from the amalgam by heating on open charcoal furnaces in small workshops, mercury vapors are emitted and inhaled by the artisanal smelters and the general population

Exploring three approaches to offer distance learning courses through a social network of health researchers in three African countries

The Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp hereby presents the results of two pilot distance learning training programmes, developed under the umbrella of the AFRICA BUILD project (FP7). The two courses focused on evidence-based medicine (EBM): with the aim of enhancing research and education, via novel approaches and to identify research needs emanating from the field. These pilot experiences, which were run both in English-speaking (Ghana), and French-speaking (Mali and Cameroon) partner institutions, produced targeted courses for the strengthening of research methodology and policy. The courses and related study materials are in the public domain and available through the AFRICA BUILD Portal (http://www.africabuild.eu/taxonomy/term/37); the training modules were delivered live via Dudal webcasts. This paper assesses the success and difficulties of transferring EBM skills with these two specific training programmes, offered through three different approaches: fully online facultative courses, fully online tutor supported courses or through a blended approach with both online and face-to-face sessions. Key factors affecting the selection of participants, the accessibility of the courses, how the learning resources are offered, and how interactive online communities are formed, are evaluated and discussed.

Capacity Building through education, research and collaboration: AFRICA BUILD, an eHealth Case Study

AFRICA BUILD (AB) is a Coordination Action project under the 7th European Framework Programme having the aim of improving the capacities for health research and education in Africa through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This project, started in 2012, has promoted health research, education and evidence-based practice in Africa through the creation of centers of excellence, by using ICT,?know-how?, eLearning and knowledge sharing, through Web-enabled virtual communities.

Context modelling for natural Human Computer Interaction applications in e-health

The conception of IoT (Internet of Things) is accepted as the future tendency of Internet among academia and industry. It will enable people and things to be connected at anytime and anyplace, with anything and anyone. IoT has been proposed to be applied into many areas such as Healthcare, Transportation，Logistics, and Smart environment etc. However, this thesis emphasizes on the home healthcare area as it is the potential healthcare model to solve many problems such as the limited medical resources, the increasing demands for healthcare from elderly and chronic patients which the traditional model is not capable of. A remarkable change in IoT in semantic oriented vision is that vast sensors or devices are involved which could generate enormous data. Methods to manage the data including acquiring, interpreting, processing and storing data need to be implemented. Apart from this, other abilities that IoT is not capable of are concluded, namely, interoperation, context awareness and security & privacy. Context awareness is an emerging technology to manage and take advantage of context to enable any type of system to provide personalized services. The aim of this thesis is to explore ways to facilitate context awareness in IoT. In order to realize this objective, a preliminary research is carried out in this thesis. The most basic premise to realize context awareness is to collect, model, understand, reason and make use of context. A complete literature review for the existing context modelling and context reasoning techniques is conducted. The conclusion is that the ontology-based context modelling and ontology-based context reasoning are the most promising and efficient techniques to manage context. In order to fuse ontology into IoT, a specific ontology-based context awareness framework is proposed for IoT applications. In general, the framework is composed of eight components which are hardware, UI (User Interface), Context modelling, Context fusion, Context reasoning, Context repository, Security unit and Context dissemination. Moreover, on the basis of TOVE (Toronto Virtual Enterprise), a formal ontology developing methodology is proposed and illustrated which consists of four stages: Specification & Conceptualization, Competency Formulation, Implementation and Validation & Documentation. In addition, a home healthcare scenario is elaborated by listing its well-defined functionalities. Aiming at representing this specific scenario, the proposed ontology developing methodology is applied and the ontology-based model is developed in a free and open-source ontology editor called Protégé. Finally, the accuracy and completeness of the proposed ontology are validated to show that this proposed ontology is able to accurately represent the scenario of interest.

Garantía de calidad en Educación Virtual No Formal para Pueblos Indígenas

Este trabajo de investigación presenta un modelo de garantía de calidad en educación Alternativa en modalidad virtual para Pueblos Indígenas del departamento de La Paz, Bolivia. Se plantea el modelo teórico constituido por componentes que emergen de la problemática enunciada, complementado con un análisis comparativo de modelos de calidad en educación virtual y la selección de variables e indicadores. Se da también una descripción del modelo causal explicativo inicial, todo esto utilizando elementos adecuados a las características de Pueblos indígenas del Dpto. de La Paz. Más adelante, se detalla la experiencia de capacitación en TIC’s a dos poblaciones indígenas aplicando el modelo planteado, lo que ha permitido hacer una validación empírica de este. Asimismo, se da a conocer los resultados que arrojaron las encuestas de calidad provenientes de la aplicación del modelo y el llenado correspondiente de las mismas. A partir de estos datos se ha realizado los análisis estadísticos pertinentes para una validación formal del modelo, estructurando una base de datos con la que se logra validar el modelo a través del análisis confirmatorio que conduce a verificar el ajuste de los datos muestrales con el modelo propuesto. ABSTRACT This research presents a model of quality assurance in Alternative education in virtual mode for indigenous communities in the department of La Paz, Bolivia. The theoretical model consisting of components that emerge from the problem expressed, supplemented by a comparative analysis of quality models in virtual education and the selection of variables and indicators arise. It also gives a description of the initial causal explanatory model, all using suited to the characteristics of indigenous communities in the Department of La Paz. Later, the experience of ICT training in two indigenous peoples applying the detailed proposed model, which has allowed for an empirical validation of this. It also discloses the results yielded quality surveys from the application of the model and the corresponding filling them. From these data it was performed statistical analysis relevant to a formal model validation, structuring a database with that achieved validate the model through confirmatory analysis leading to check the setting of the sample data with the model proposed.