An Interdisciplinary Practical for Multimedia Engineering Students

Interdisciplinary projects in the industry typically require collaboration between professionals from various fields. However, this relationship is not generally addressed in the training offered by university programs, which often ignore this interdisciplinary approach. This paper offers an example of interdisciplinary interaction through joint laboratory activities in the curricula of two very different degree programs, i.e., Multimedia Engineering and Teacher Training in Primary Education. The programs' students formed an interdisciplinary team of multimedia engineers and trainee teachers to develop a Web product for children's cognitive development. The complexity of the task required students to engage in close and strong interdisciplinary cooperation and communication; in turn, they benefited from the synergy offered by collaborative work. The results of this paper, presented from the perspective of the multimedia engineering students, demonstrate a significant increase in their academic performance compared to the control group. This paper shows that university studies can incorporate an interdisciplinary perspective to engineering education without the need to introduce a specific course on the topic, thus avoiding further demands on the curriculum schedule.

Looking inside for good practice in Deaf bilingual education: a participatory SWOT analysis

Presentation to the Disability Studies Conference, Lancaster University, September 7-9, 2010.

Design of online practical lessons in colorimetry

Applied colorimetry is an important module in the program of the elective subject "Colour Science: industrial applications”. This course is taught in the Optics and Optometry Degree and it has been used as a testing for the application of new teaching and assessment techniques consistent with the new European Higher Education Area. In particular, the main objective was to reduce the attendance to lessons and encourage the individual and collective work of students. The reason for this approach is based on the idea that students are able to work at their own learning pace. Within this dynamic work, we propose online lab practice based on Excel templates that our research group has developed ad-hoc for different aspects of colorimetry, such as conversion to different colour spaces, calculation of perceptual descriptors (hue, saturation, lightness), calculation of colour differences, colour matching dyes, etc. The practice presented in this paper is focused on the learning of colour differences. The session is based on a specific Excel template to compute the colour differences and to plot different graphs with these colour differences defined at different colour spaces: CIE ΔE, CIE ΔE94 and the CIELAB colour space. This template is implemented on a website what works by addressing the student work at a proper and organized way. The aim was to unify all the student work from a website, therefore the student is able to learn in an autonomous and sequential way and in his own pace. To achieve this purpose, all the tools, links and documents are collected for each different proposed activity to achieve guided specific objectives. In the context of educational innovation, this type of website is normally called WebQuest. The design of a WebQuest is established according to the criteria of usability and simplicity. There are great advantages of using WebQuests versus the toolbox “Campus Virtual” available in the University of Alicante. The Campus Virtual is an unfriendly environment for this specific purpose as the activities are organized in different sectors depending on whether the activity is a discussion, an activity, a self-assessment or the download of materials. With this separation, it is more difficult that the student follows an organized sequence. However, our WebQuest provides a more intuitive graphical environment, and besides, all the tasks and resources needed to complete them are grouped and organized according to a linear sequence. In this way, the student guided learning is optimized. Furthermore, with this simplification, the student focuses on learning and not to waste resources. Finally, this tool has a wide set of potential applications: online courses of colorimetry applied for postgraduate students, Open Course Ware, etc.

Practical experiences on a real pumping system emulated by a hardware model and used as a remote laboratory

Paper submitted to ACE 2013, 10th IFAC Symposium on Advances in Control Education, University of Sheffield, UK, August 28-30, 2013.

Subclinical social anxiety and academic performance in adolescence: analysis of theoretical and practical implications

This study analyses the relationship between self-reported social anxiety and academic performance in a sample of 1,616 Spanish students (52.1% males) in compulsory secondary education, aged 12 to 16 years old. Social anxiety was assessed by the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI) and academic performance was measured with school grades and failing grades. Results reveal that adolescents with social anxiety show a similar academic performance to adolescents without social anxiety. Although t tests found some significant differences in academic grades and number of failing grades, the effect size analysis showed that these differences had no empirical relevance. These findings are discussed considering the gender and grade levels and their theoretical and practical implication.

Spanish Nursing Students' Practical Experience of Computer Applications in Nursing

This study aimed to determine the level of computer practical experience in a sample of Spanish nursing students. Each student was given a Spanish language questionnaire, modified from an original used previously with medical students at the Medical School of North Carolina University (USA) and also at the Education Unit of Hospital General Universitario del Mar (Spain). The 10-item self-report questionnaire probed for information about practical experience with computers. A total of 126 students made up the sample. The majority were female (80.2%; n=101). The results showed that just over half (57.1%, n=72) of the students had used a computer game (three or more times before), and that only one third (37.3%, n=47) had the experience of using a word processing package. Moreover, other applications and IT-based facilities (e.g. statistical packages, e-mail, databases, CD-ROM searches, programming languages and computer-assisted learning) had never been used by the majority of students. The student nurses' practical experience was less than that reported for medical students in previous studies.

Assessment of Web Content Accessibility Levels in Spanish Official Online Education Environments

Diversity-based designing, or the goal of ensuring that web-based information is accessible to as many diverse users as possible, has received growing international acceptance in recent years, with many countries introducing legislation to enforce it. This paper analyses web content accessibility levels in Spanish education portals according to the international guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Additionally, it suggests the calculation of an inaccessibility rate as a tool for measuring the degree of non-compliance with WAI Guidelines 2.0 as well as illustrating the significant gap that separates people with disabilities from digital education environments (with a 7.77% average). A total of twenty-one educational web portals with two different web depth levels (42 sampling units) were assessed for this purpose using the automated analysis tool Web Accessibility Test 2.0 (TAW, for its initials in Spanish). The present study reveals a general trend towards non-compliance with the technical accessibility recommendations issued by the W3C-WAI group (97.62% of the websites examined present mistakes in Level A conformance). Furthermore, despite the increasingly high number of legal and regulatory measures about accessibility, their practical application still remains unsatisfactory. A greater level of involvement must be assumed in order to raise awareness and enhance training efforts towards accessibility in the context of collective Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), since this represents not only a necessity but also an ethical, social, political and legal commitment to be assumed by society.

Validation of a Spanish version of the Distance Education Learning Environments Survey (DELES) in Spain

The aim of this study was to examine the validity of the Spanish version of the Distance Education Learning Environments Survey (Sp-DELES). This instrument assesses students’ perceptions of virtual learning environments using six scales: Instructor Support, Student Interaction and Collaboration, Personal Relevance, Authentic Learning, Active Learning, and Autonomy. Further, the Sp-DELES includes an additional scale that assesses students’ Satisfaction with their classes. The original DELES has been used in at least 27 independent studies with strong reliability and validity. For this study, we sampled 265 students from the University of Alicante enrolled in various hybrid and distance education courses taught by the Department of Health Psychology. We analysed the Sp-DELES for validity using principal component factor analysis with varimax rotation, and for reliability using Cronbach’s alpha. The Sp-DELES exhibited good reliability (Cronbach’s alpha for the scales ranging from 0.86 to 0.97) and the original six-factor structure was replicated and accounted for 72.9 % of the total variance. Overall the results are consistent with those of the original English-language version of the instrument. The Sp-DELES has proven to be a reliable and valid instrument for assessing psychosocial learning environments in tertiary-level hybrid and distance-education settings.

The importance of promoting multimodal teaching in the foreign language classroom for the acquisition of social competences: practical examples

This article analyses the way in which the subject English Language V of the degree English Studies (English Language and Literature) combines the development of the five skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing and interacting) with the use of multimodal activities and resources in the teaching-learning process so that students increase their motivation and acquire different social competences that will be useful for the labour market such as communication, cooperation, leadership or conflict management. This study highlights the use of multimodal materials (texts, videos, etc.) on social topics to introduce cultural aspects in a language subject and to deepen into the different social competences university students can acquire when they work with them. The study was guided by the following research questions: how can multimodal texts and resources contribute to the development of the five skills in a foreign language classroom? What are the main social competences that students acquire when the teaching-learning process is multimodal? The results of a survey prepared at the end of the academic year 2015-2016 point out the main competences that university students develop thanks to multimodal teaching. For its framework of analysis, the study draws on the main principles of visual grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) where students learn how to analyse the main aspects in multimodal texts. The analysis of the different multimodal activities described in the article and the survey reveal that multimodality is useful for developing critical thinking, for bringing cultural aspects into the classroom and for working on social competences. This article will explain the successes and challenges of using multimodal texts with social content so that students can acquire social competences while learning content. Moreover, the implications of using multimodal resources in a language classroom to develop multiliteracies will be observed.