Systems thinking: learning or driving?

The ability to foresee how behaviour of a system arises from the interaction of its components over time - i.e. its dynamic complexity ��� is seen an important ability to take effective decisions in our turbulent world. Dynamic complexity emerges frequently from interrelated simple structures, such as stocks and flows, feedbacks and delays (Forrester, 1961). Common sense assumes an intuitive understanding of their dynamic behaviour. However, recent researches have pointed to a persistent and systematic error in people understanding of those building blocks of complex systems. This paper describes an empirical study concerning the native ability to understand systems thinking concepts. Two different groups - one, academic, the other, professional ��� submitted to four tasks, proposed by Sweeney and Sterman (2000) and Sterman (2002). The results confirm a poor intuitive understanding of the basic systems concepts, even when subjects have background in mathematics and sciences.

Systems thinking: learning or driving?

The ability to foresee how behaviour of a system arises from the interaction of its components over time - i.e. its dynamic complexity ��� is seen an important ability to take effective decisions in our turbulent world. Dynamic complexity emerges frequently from interrelated simple structures, such as stocks and flows, feedbacks and delays (Forrester, 1961). Common sense assumes an intuitive understanding of their dynamic behaviour. However, recent researches have pointed to a persistent and systematic error in people understanding of those building blocks of complex systems. This paper describes an empirical study concerning the native ability to understand systems thinking concepts. Two different groups - one, academic, the other, professional ��� submitted to four tasks, proposed by Sweeney and Sterman (2000) and Sterman (2002). The results confirm a poor intuitive understanding of the basic systems concepts, even when subjects have background in mathematics and sciences.

A bot spooler architecture to integrate virtual worlds with e-learning management systems for corporate training

Joining efforts of academic and corporate teams, we developed an integration architecture - MULTIS - that enables corporate e-learning managers to use a Learning Management System (LMS) for management of educational activities in virtual worlds. This architecture was then implemented for the Formare LMS. In this paper we present this architecture and concretizations of its implementation for the Second Life Grid/OpenSimulator virtual world platforms. Current systems are focused on activities managed by individual trainers, rather than groups of trainers and large numbers of trainees: they focus on providing the LMS with information about educational activities taking place in a virtual world and/or being able to access within the virtual world some of the information stored in the LMS, and disregard the streamlining of activity setup and data collection in multi-trainer contexts, among other administrative issues. This architecture aims to overcome the limitations of existing systems for organizational management of corporate e-learning activities.

Learning to manage in knowledge based organizations: the role of portfolios

Paper presented at the 8th European Conference on Knowledge Management, Barcelona, 6-7 Sep. 2008 URL: http://www.academic-conferences.org/eckm/eckm2007/eckm07-home.htm

A utiliza����o da plataforma Educast@fccn, como ferramenta de grava����o de aulas no ambiente de e-learning portugu��s

Disserta����o apresentada �� Escola Superior de Comunica����o Social como parte dos requisitos para obten����o de grau de mestre em Audiovisual e Multim��dia.

Academic social network in EHES

This paper presents the foundations of an Academic Social Network (ASN) focusing the Bologna Declaration and the Bologna Process (BP) mobility issues using ontological support. An ASN will permit students to share commons academic interests, preferences and mobility paths in the European Higher Education Space (EHES). The description of the conceptual support is ontology based allowing knowledge sharing and reuse. An approach is presented by merging Academic Ontology to Support the Bologna Mobility Process with Friend of a Friend ontology. The resulting ontology supports the student mobility profile in the ASN. The strategies to make available, in the network, knowledge about mobility issues, are presented including knowledge discovery and simulation approaches to cover student's mobility scenarios for BP.

Towards a complex model of cooperative learning

Este artigo �� uma introdu����o �� teoria do paradigma desconstrutivo de aprendizagem cooperativa. Centenas de estudos provam com evid��ncias o facto de que as estruturas e os processos de aprendizagem cooperativa aumentam o desempenho acad��mico, refor��am as compet��ncias de aprendizagem ao longo da vida e desenvolvem compet��ncias sociais, pessoais de cada aluno de uma forma mais eficaz e usta, comparativamente ��s estruturas tradicionais de aprendizagem nas escolas. Enfrentando os desafios dos nossos sistemas educativos, seria interessante elaborar o quadro te��rico do discurso da aprendizagem cooperativa, dos ��ltimos 40 anos, a partir de um aspeto pr��tico dentro do contexto te��rico e metodol��gico. Nas ��ltimas d��cadas, o discurso cooperativo elaborou os elementos pr��ticos e te��ricos de estruturas e processos de aprendizagem cooperativa. Gostar��amos de fazer um resumo desses elementos com o objetivo de compreender que tipo de mudan��as estruturais podem fazer diferen��as reais na pr��tica de ensino e aprendizagem. Os princ��pios b��sicos de estruturas cooperativas, os pap��is de coopera����o e as atitudes cooperativas s��o os principais elementos que podemos brevemente descrever aqui, de modo a criar um quadro para a compreens��o te��rica e pr��tica de como podemos sugerir os elementos de aprendizagem cooperativa na nossa pr��tica em sala de aula. Na minha perspetiva, esta complexa teoria da aprendizagem cooperativa pode ser entendida como um paradigma desconstrutivo que fornece algumas respostas pragm��ticas para as quest��es da nossa pr��tica educativa quotidiana, a partir do n��vel da sala de aula para o n��vel de sistema educativo, com foco na destrui����o de estruturas hier��rquicas e antidemocr��ticas de aprendizagem e, criando, ao mesmo tempo, as estruturas cooperativas.

Reasserting curriculum design through virtual learning environments : The case of MAPE

II European Conference on Curriculum Studies. "Curriculum studies: Policies, perspectives and practices���. Porto, FPCEUP, October 16th - 17th.

The emergence of a curriculum model for online learning in a context of late investment in distance education

ECER 2015 "Education and Transition - Contributions from Educational Research", Corvinus University of Budapest from 7 to 11 September 2015.

A B-learning strategy for Therapeutics at the Bachelor Level

Background Information:The incorporation of distance learning activities by institutions of higher education is considered an important contribution to create new opportunities for teaching at both, initial and continuing training. In Medicine and Nursing, several papers illustrate the adaptation of technological components and teaching methods are prolific, however, when we look at the Pharmaceutical Education area, the examples are scarce. In that sense this project demonstrates the implementation and assessment of a B-Learning Strategy for Therapeutics using a ���case based learning��� approach. Setting: Academic Pharmacy Methods:This is an exploratory study involving 2nd year students of the Pharmacy Degree at the School of Allied Health Sciences of Oporto. The study population consists of 61 students, divided in groups of 3-4 elements. The b-learning model was implemented during a time period of 8 weeks. Results:A B-learning environment and digital learning objects were successfully created and implemented. Collaboration and assessment techniques were carefully developed to ensure the active participation and fair assessment of all students. Moodle records show a consistent activity of students during the assignments. E-portfolios were also developed using Wikispaces, which promoted reflective writing and clinical reasoning. Conclusions:Our exploratory study suggests that the ���case based learning��� method can be successfully combined with the technological components to create and maintain a feasible online learning environment for the teaching of therapeutics.

A distributed system for learning programming on-line

Several Web-based on-line judges or on-line programming trainers have been developed in order to allow students to train their programming skills. However, their pedagogical functionalities in the learning of programming have not been clearly de���ned. EduJudge is a project which aims to integrate the ���UVA On-line Judge���, an existing on-line programming trainer with an important number of problems and users, into an effective educational environment consisting of the e-learning platform Moodle and the competitive learning tool QUESTOURnament. The result is the EduJudge system which allows teachers to apply different pedagogical approaches using a proven e-learning platform, makes problems easy to search through an effective search engine, and provides an automated evaluation of the solutions submitted to these problems. The ���nal objective is to provide new learning strategies to motivate students and present programming as an easy and attractive challenge. EduJudge has been tried and tested in three algorithms and programming courses in three different Engineering degrees. The students��� motivation and satisfaction levels were analysed alongside the effects of the EduJudge system on students��� academic outcomes. Results indicate that both students and teachers found that among other multiple bene���ts the EduJudge system facilitates the learning process. Furthermore, the experi- ment also showed an improvement in students��� academic outcomes. It must be noted that the students��� level of satisfaction did not depend on their computer skills or their gender.

O desenvolvimento de um modelo de ensino virtual num contexto de investimento incipiente em e - learning: progressos e desafios

Este artigo relata o desenvolvimento de um modelo de ensino virtual em curso na Universidade dos A��ores. Depois de ter sido adotado na leciona����o de disciplinas da ��rea da Teoria e Desenvolvimento Curricular em regime de e-learning e b-learning, o modelo foi, no ano acad��mico de 2014/15, estendido �� leciona����o de outras disciplinas. Al��m de descrever o modelo e explicar a sua evolu����o, o artigo destaca a sua ado����o no contexto particular de uma disciplina cuja componente online foi lecionada em circunst��ncias especialmente desafiadoras. Neste sentido, explica o processo de avalia����o da experi��ncia, discute os seus resultados e sugere pistas de melhoria. Essa avalia����o enquadra-se num processo de investiga����o do design curricular ��� a metodologia que tem sido usada para estudar o desenvolvimento do modelo.

Managing informal learning in engineering contexts: the learners' perspective

According to recent studies, informal learning accounts for more than 75% of our continuous learning through life. However, the awareness of this learning, its benefits and its potential is still not very clear. In engineering contexts, informal learning could play an invaluable role helping students or employees to engage with peers and also with more experience colleagues, exchanging ideas and discussing problems. This work presents an initial set of results of the piloting phase of a project (TRAILER) where an innovative service based on Information & Communication Technologies was developed in order to aid the collection and visibility of informal learning. This set of results concerns engineering contexts (academic and business), from the learners' perspective. The major idea that emerged from these piloting trials was that it represented a good way of collecting, recording and sharing informal learning that otherwise could easily be forgotten. Several benefits were reported between the two communities such as being helpful in managing competences and human resources within an institution.

Integration of e-learning systems with repositories of learning objects

This paper describes a communication model to integrate repositories of programming problems with other e-Learning software components. The motivation for this work comes from the EduJudge project that aims to connect an existing repository of programming problems to learning management systems. When trying to use the existing repositories of learning objects we realized that they are mainly specialized search engines and lack features for integration with other e-Learning systems. With this model we intend to clarify the main features of a programming problem repository, in order to enable the design and development of software components that use it. The two main points of this model are the definition of programming problems as learning objects and the definition of the core functions exposed by the repository. In both cases, this model follows the existing specifications of the IMS standard and proposes extensions to deal with the special requirements of automatic evaluation and grading of programming exercises. In the definition of programming problems as learning objects we introduced a new schema for meta-data. This schema is used to represent meta-data related to automatic evaluation that cannot be conveniently represented using the standard: the type of automatic evaluation; the requirements of the evaluation engine; or the roles of different assets - tests cases, program solutions, etc. In the definition of the core functions we used two different web services flavours - SOAP and REST - and described each function as an operation for each type of interface. We describe also the data types of the arguments of each operation. These data types consist mainly on learning objects and their identifications, but include also usage reports and queries using XQuery.

Towards e-learning 2.0: case study of an e-learning environment

In these days the learning experience is no longer confined within the four walls of a classroom. Computers and primarily the internet have broadened this horizon by creating a way of delivering education that is known as e-learning. In the meantime, the internet, or more precisely, the Web is heading towards a new paradigm where the user is no longer just a consumer of information and becomes an active part in the communication. This two-way channel where the user takes the role of the producer of content triggered the appearance of new types of services such as Social Networks, Blogs and Wikis. To seize this second generation of communities and services, educational vendors are willing to develop e-learning systems focused on the new and emergent users needs. This paper describes the analysis and specification of an e-learning environment at our School (ESEIG) towards this new Web generation, called PEACE ��� Project for ESEIG Academic Environment. This new model relies on the integration of several services controlled by teachers and students such as social networks, repositories libraries, e-portfolios and e-conference sytems, intelligent tutors, recommendation systems, automatic evaluators, virtual classrooms and 3D avatars.