Affective Computing to Enhance E-Learning in Segregated Societies

According to UN Women, to build stronger economies, it is essential to empower women to participate fully in economic life across all sectors. Increasing women and girls’ education enhances their chances to participate in the labor market. In certain cultures, like in Saudi Arabia, women contribution to the public economy growth is very limited. According to the World Bank, less than 20 percent of the female population participate in the labor force. This low participation rate has many reasons. One of them, is the educational level and educational quality for females. Although Saudi Arabia has about thirty three universities, opportunities are still limited for women because of the restrictions of access put upon them. A mixture of local norms, traditions, social beliefs, and principles preventing women from receiving full benefits from the educational system. Gender segregation is one of the challenges that limits the women access for education. It causes a problem due to the shortage of female faculty throughout the country. To overcome this problem, male faculty are allowed to teach female students under certain regulations and following a certain method of education delivery and interaction. However, most of these methods lack face-to-face communication between the teacher and students, which lowers the interactivity level and, accordingly, the students’ engagement, and increases the need for other alternatives. The e-learning model is one of high benefit for female students in such societies. Recognizing the students’ engagement is not straightforward in the e-learning model. To measure the level of engagement, the learner’s mood or emotions should be taken into consideration to help understanding and judging the level of engagement. This paper is to investigate the relationship between emotions and engagement in the e-learning environment, and how recognizing the learner’s emotions and change the content delivery accordingly can affect the efficiency of the e-learning process. The proposed experiment alluded to herein should help to find ways to increase the engagement of the learners, hence, enhance the efficiency of the learning process and the quality of learning, which will increase the chances and opportunities for women in such societies to participate more effectively in the labor market.

Developing a Technoself System to Improve Lifelong Learning Engagement

Lifelong learning exists today in the context of a cultural and societal shift to a knowledge-based, technology-enhanced, and rapidly-changing economy. It has a significant impact on people’s lives and has become of vital importance with the emergence of new technologies that change how people communicate, collect information, and collaborate with others. The emerging technologies, such as social networking, interactive media and game technology, have expanded a new dimension of self – ‘technoself’ driven by socio-technical innovations and taken an important step forward in lifelong learning through the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). The TEL encourages learners as producers to embed personalized knowledge and collective experience on individualized learning within professional practice. It becomes more personal and social than traditional lifelong learning, especially about the ‘learning as socially grounded’ aspects. This paper studies the development of technoself system during lifelong learning and introduces technoself enhanced learning as a novel sociological framework of lifelong learning to couple the educational dimension with social dimension in order to enhance learner engagement by shaping personal learning focus and setting. We examine how people construct their own inquiry and learn from others, how people shift and adapt in these technoself-enhanced learning environments, and how learner engagement is improving as the involvement of learners as producers in lifelong learning. We further discuss the barriers and the positive and negative unintended consequences of using technology for lifelong learning.

A utilização da plataforma Educast@fccn, como ferramenta de gravação de aulas no ambiente de e-learning português

Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Audiovisual e Multimédia.

Unlocking the technology-mediated learning process : insights and articulating actions for an institutional approach

This paper is part of the results from the project "Implementation Strategies and Development of an Open and Distance Education System for the University of the Azores" funded by the European Social Fund. http://hdl.handle.net/10400.3/2327

Prática de ensino supervisionado no 1.º e 2.º ciclo do ensino básico: a importância das atividades práticas no processo de ensino e aprendizagem do Estudo do Meio Social (1.º CEB)

Relatório de Estágio apresentado à Escola Superior de Educação de Lisboa para obtenção de grau de mestre em Ensino do 1.º e 2.º ciclo do Ensino Básico

Work in progress - learning through role play games

It is commonly accepted that the educational environment has been undergoing considerable change due to the use of the Information and Communication tools. But learning depends upon actions such as experimenting, visualizing and demonstrating through which the learner succeeds in constructing his own knowledge. Although it is not easy to achieve these actions through current ICT supported learning approaches, Role Playing Games (RPG) may well develop such capacities. The creation of an interactive computer game with RPG characteristics, about the 500th anniversary of the city of Funchal, the capital of Madeira Island, is invested with compelling educational/pedagogical implications, aiming clearly at teaching history and social relations through playing. Players interpret different characters in different settings/scenarios, experiencing adventures, meeting challenges and trying to reach multiple and simultaneous goals in the areas of education, entertainment and social integration along the first 150 years of the history of Funchal. Through this process they will live and understand all the social and historical factors of that epoch.

Informal learning recognition through a cloud ecosystem

Learning and teaching processes, like all human activities, can be mediated through the use of tools. Information and communication technologies are now widespread within education. Their use in the daily life of teachers and learners affords engagement with educational activities at any place and time and not necessarily linked to an institution or a certificate. In the absence of formal certification, learning under these circumstances is known as informal learning. Despite the lack of certification, learning with technology in this way presents opportunities to gather information about and present new ways of exploiting an individual’s learning. Cloud technologies provide ways to achieve this through new architectures, methodologies, and workflows that facilitate semantic tagging, recognition, and acknowledgment of informal learning activities. The transparency and accessibility of cloud services mean that institutions and learners can exploit existing knowledge to their mutual benefit. The TRAILER project facilitates this aim by providing a technological framework using cloud services, a workflow, and a methodology. The services facilitate the exchange of information and knowledge associated with informal learning activities ranging from the use of social software through widgets, computer gaming, and remote laboratory experiments. Data from these activities are shared among institutions, learners, and workers. The project demonstrates the possibility of gathering information related to informal learning activities independently of the context or tools used to carry them out.

Interoperability on e-learning 2.0: the PEACE case study

The confluence of education with the evolution of technology boosted the paradigm shift of the face-to-face learning to distance learning. In this scenario e-Learning plays an essential role as a facilitator of the teaching/learning process. However new demands associated with the new Web paradigm require that existent e-Learning environments characterized mostly by monolithic systems begin interacting with new specialized services. In this decentralized scenario the definition of a strategy of interoperability is the cornerstone to ensure the standardization communication among systems. This paper presents a definition of an interoperability strategy for an e-Learning environment at our School (ESEIG) called PEACE – Project for ESEIG Academic Content Environment. This new interoperability model relies on the application of several coordination and integration standards on several services, controlled by teachers and students, and included in the PEACE environment such as social networks, repositories, libraries, e-portfolios, intelligent tutors, recommendation systems and virtual classrooms.

Learning management systems in higher education

The use of Laptops and the Internet has produced the technological conditions for instructors and students can take advantage from the diversity of online information, communication, collaboration and sharing with others. The integration of Internet services in the teaching practices can be responsible for thematic, social and digital improvement for the agents involved. There are many benefits when we use a Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as Moodle, to support the lectures in higher education. We also will consider its implications for student support and online interaction, leading educational agents to a collaborating of different learning environments, where they can combine face-to-face instruction with computer-mediated instruction, blended-learning, and increases the possibilities for better quality and quantity of human communication in a learning background. In general components of learning management systems contain synchronous and asynchronous communication tools, management features, and assessment utilities. These assessment utilities allow lecturers to systematize basic assessment tasks. Assessments can be straightaway delivered to the student, and upon conclusion, immediately returned with grades and detailed feedback. Therefore learning management systems can also be used for assessment purposes in Higher Education.

LSP communication in a digital age: the outcomes of teaching and learning in tertiary education

This paper discusses the changes brought by the communication revolution in teaching and learning in the scope of LSP. Its aim is to provide an insight on how teaching which was bi-dimensional, turned into a multidimensional system, gathering other complementary resources that have transformed, in a incredibly short time, the ways we receive share and store information, for instance as professionals, and keep in touch with our peers. The increasing rise of electronic publications, the incredible boom of social and professional networks, search engines, blogs, list servs, forums, e-mail blasts, Facebook pages, YouTube contents, Tweets and Apps, have twisted the way information is conveyed. Classes ceased to be predictable and have been empowered by digital platforms, innumerous and different data repositories (TILDE, IATE, LINGUEE, and so many other terminological data banks) that have definitely transformed the academic world in general and tertiary education in particular. There is a bulk of information to be digested by students, who are no longer passive but instead responsible and active for their academic outcomes. The question is whether they possess the tools to select only what is accurate and important for a certain subject or assignment, due to that overflow? Due to the reduction of the number of course years in most degrees, after the implementation of Bologna and the shrinking of the curricula contents, have students the possibility of developing critical thinking? Both teaching and learning rely on digital resources to improve the speed of the spreading of knowledge. But have those changes been effective to promote really communication? Furthermore, with the increasing Apps that have already been developed and will continue to appear for learning foreign languages, for translation among others, will the students feel the need of learning them once they have those Apps. These are some the questions we would like to discuss in our paper.

Maximizing the Social Welfare of Virtual Power Players Operation in Case of Excessive Wind Power

The integration of growing amounts of distributed generation in power systems, namely at distribution networks level, has been fostered by energy policies in several countries around the world, including in Europe. This intensive integration of distributed, non-dispatchable, and natural sources based generation (including wind power) has caused several changes in the operation and planning of power systems and of electricity markets. Sometimes the available non-dispatchable generation is higher than the demand. This generation must be used; otherwise it is wasted if not stored or used to supply additional demand. New policies and market rules, as well as new players, are needed in order to competitively integrate all the resources. The methodology proposed in this paper aims at the maximization of the social welfare in a distribution network operated by a virtual power player that aggregates and manages the available energy resources. When facing a situation of excessive non-dispatchable generation, including wind power, real time pricing is applied in order to induce the increase of consumption so that wind curtailment is minimized. This method is especially useful when actual and day-ahead resources forecast differ significantly. The distribution network characteristics and concerns are addressed by including the network constraints in the optimization model. The proposed methodology has been implemented in GAMS optimization tool and its application is illustrated in this paper using a real 937-bus distribution network with 20.310 consumers and 548 distributed generators, some of them non-dispatchable and with must take contracts. The implemented scenario corresponds to a real day in Portuguese power system.

A arte de envelhecer dançando: recordar o passado e preparar o futuro no Centro Social da Paróquia de Santa Eulália de Nespereira

Com a realização do trabalho, que agora se apresenta, tem-se como finalidade refletir sobre a maneira como se pode envelhecer dançando. Sustentados na metodologia de projeto, o esforço recaiu numa análise sobre as conexões das necessidades emergentes dos participantes, no que concerne desejos e motivações dos idosos1 (bem como as diferentes implicações subjacentes e latentes), com a possibilidade de as concretizar pela dança. Intentou-se, assim depreender de que forma numa sociedade global, onde o acesso a informações e conhecimentos atualizados é fundamental, a motivação para a aquisição de novas competências, adaptadas a novos desafios e situações, é considerada crucial e possível na idade adulta, e mais concretamente no período de reforma e, particularmente neste caso, na melhoria da ocupação dos tempos livres, desenvolvendo novas competências e estímulos. Tendo em conta os interesses e a implicação dos idosos, direcionou-se o trabalho no sentido de se construir um projeto com e para os idosos, através da metodologia de investigação ação participativa, mostrando como não há idade para aprender nem para ensinar, de forma a potenciar melhorias na qualidade de vida dos participantes, nos tempos livres ocupando-os e implicando-os, suplantando as habituais atividade comummente designadas de “entreter velhinhos”.

Integrating rich learning applications in LMS

Currently, a learning management system (LMS) plays a central role in any e-learning environment. These environments include systems to handle the pedagogic aspects of the teaching–learning process (e.g. specialized tutors, simulation games) and the academic aspects (e.g. academic management systems). Thus, the potential for interoperability is an important, although over looked, aspect of an LMS. In this paper, we make a comparative study of the interoperability level of the most relevant LMS. We start by defining an application and a specification model. For the application model, we create a basic application that acts as a tool provider for LMS integration. The specification model acts as the API that the LMS should implement to communicate with the tool provider. Based on researches, we select the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) from IMS. Finally, we compare the LMS interoperability level defined as the effort made to integrate the application on the study LMS.

Ensino de informática básica a deficientes visuais em regime e-learning em Cabo Verde

Trabalho de Projecto apresentado para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Gestão de Sistemas de E-Learning

English Language Learning Inside and Outside the Classroom in Portugal

This study investigates the way of learning the English language in Portugal. First-year students of the faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of New University of Lisbon were selected as participants in the case study. As data collection tools a questionnaire and focus-groups were used. 115 students completed the designed questionnaire and after that 12 students were selected for the more detailed focus-group discussions. Results of the research show that most part of the students´ English knowledge is received from outside the classroom by means of movies, songs, computer games, the Internet, communication with friends and other sources. Also, the results show that motivation is very important in language learning process and motivated students acquire the language faster and easier.