Exploring the use of cooperative activities in a language subject to develop students’ social competences at the University

Cooperative learning has been successfully implemented in the last 60 years for teaching at different educational levels including the Higher Studies due to its solid theoretical foundation, the principles it proposes and its practical applications. The purpose of this article is to offer a proposal for some cooperative activities that allow students to work in small groups in a language subject in order to learn not only contents but also putting into practice what they learn, i.e., they learn by being active. This article discusses how the said activities make it possible for students to work with the main principles of cooperative learning, i.e.: positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction, individual and group accountability, interpersonal and small-group skills and group processing. Moreover, this research will also point out that the proposed activities allow students to acquire some of the social competences required in the labour market such as leadership, conflict solving and cooperation.

Review and extension of the McCabe-Thiele method covering multiple feeds, products and heat transfer stages

The McCabe-Thiele method is a classical approximate graphical method for the conceptual design of binary distillation columns which is still widely used, mainly for didactical purposes, though it is also valuable for quick preliminary calculations. Nevertheless, no complete description of the method has been found and situations such as different thermal feed conditions, multiple feeds, possibilities to extract by-products or to add or remove heat, are not always considered. In the present work we provide a systematic analysis of such situations by developing the generalized equations for: a) the operating lines (OL) of each sector, and b) the changeover line that provides the connection between two consecutive trays of the corresponding sectors separated by a lateral stream of feed, product, or a heat removal or addition.

Developing Semantic Rich Internet Applications with the Sm4RIA Extension for OIDE

This paper introduces the Sm4RIA Extension for OIDE, which implements the Sm4RIA approach in OIDE (OOH4RIA Integrated Development Environment). The application, based on the Eclipse framework, supports the design of the Sm4RIA models as well as the model-to-model and model-to-text transformation processes that facilitate the generation of Semantic Rich Internet Applications, i.e., RIA applications capable of sharing data as Linked data and consuming external data from other sources in the same manner. Moreover, the application implements mechanisms for the creation of RIA interfaces from ontologies and the automatic generation of administration interfaces for a previously design application.