Jordi Conesa

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya | UOC

Despite advances in educational technology, the specific ways in which Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) and Large Language Models cater to learners’ nuanced cognitive and emotional needs are not fully understood. This mini-review methodically describes GAI’s practical implementations and limitations in meeting these needs. It included journ...

Background: Chronic neck and low back pain are very common and have detrimental effects for people and the society. In this study, we explore the experiences of individuals with neck and/or back pain using a written narrative methodology. Material and Methods: 92 individuals explained their pain experience using written narratives. Narratives were...

New technological advancements have always changed the way society and human relationships work. New affordances created by technological tools inevitable modify and affect the way people interact with such tools, as well as with one another, and with the world within which this technology is embedded. Technology, Users and Uses explores and discu...

Ethics is an important part in the training of professionals. Most associations have their own code of ethical practices, and many public and private institutions highlight the importance of integrating ethical standards into their practice. Due to this, ethics already appears, in one way or another, in almost every syllabus in professional and hig...

Although Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been reported as an efficient and important educational tool, there are issues related to their educational impact. More specifically, there are dropouts during a course, little participation, and lack of learners’ motivation and engagement overall. This paper describes the results of the European p...

Videos created with the hands of teachers filmed have been perceived as useful educational resource for students of Physics in undergraduate courses. In previous works, we analyzed the students’ perception about educational videos by asking them about their experiences. In this work, we analyze the same facts, but from a learning analytics perspect...

The incorporation of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in different fields and areas provide many benefits in automation, resource consumption, and efficiency. However, the deployment of information systems that can exhibit autonomous behavior—and, thus, that can make decisions that have an effect on their users—may need to...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) allow students and instructors to discuss through messages posted on a forum. However, the instructors should limit their interaction to the most critical tasks during MOOC delivery so, teacher-led scaffolding activities, such as forum-based support, can be very limited, even impossible in such environments. In a...

Ethical dilemmas are complex scenarios involving a decision between conflicting choices related to ethical principles. While considering a case of an ethical dilemma in education presented in [17], it can be seen how, in these situations, it might be needed to take into consideration the student’s needs, preferences, and potentially conflicting goa...

Citation: Perez-Navarro, A.; Garcia, V.; Conesa, J. Students' Behavior and Perceptions Regarding Complementary Videos for Introductory Physics Courses in an Online Environment. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 523. https://doi. Publisher's Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Featured A...

Digital videos have an important (and increasing) presence in learning processes, especially within online universities and schools. However, creating videos is a time-consuming activity for teachers, who are usually not expert in video creation. Therefore, it is important to know which kind of video is perceived as more satisfactory and useful by...

Pedagogical conversational agents (PCA) aimed at offering personalized support could greatly enhance the student experience by adapting their support to the student’s learning needs and habits. But, as they become more autonomous, there is a greater need to consider the potential moral consequences of their choices and to take into consideration an...

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been used in online learning to improve teaching and learning, with the aim of providing a more efficient, purposeful, adaptive, ubiquitous, and fair learning experiences. However, and as it has been seen in other contexts, the integration of AI can have unforeseen consequences with detrimental effe...

Around 25 years ago, some researchers argued for moving towards innovative learning models characterized by being more personalized and where the students would have a more active role in deciding what to learn, when to learn and how to learn. Nowadays, there is a need for a flexible, efficient, universal and lifelong education. Lifelong learning i...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) introduce a way of transcending formal education by realizing technology-enhanced formats of learning and instruction and by granting access to an audience way beyond higher education. However, although MOOCs have been reported as an efficient and important educational tool, there is a number of issues and proble...

All changes are difficult and moving from face-to-face to online learning is not an exception. Nowadays, online students have many supports to ease their learning process due to the evolution of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), the maturity of the pedagogical models used, and the vast experience of online teachers who design, create and deploy...

This research provides a biomedical ontology to adequately represent the information necessary to manage a person with a disease in the context of a specific patient. A bottom-up approach was used to build the ontology, best ontology practices described in the literature were followed and the minimum information to reference an external ontology te...

Today, lifelong learning is fully integrated into our society. From the student point of view, lifelong learning has several characteristics that differentiate it from regular learning: domains of interest may be very broad; learning occurs in different depths; topics to study may be related both to work, family and leisure; students’ continuity ca...

Introduction eHealth is a new approach for managing several health conditions, but up to now not so many interventions have shown their efficacy/effectiveness. The AUTAPP Project tries to add knowledge in eHealth interventions targeted to Mental Health disorders, specifically Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) management that requires complex intervent...

Introduction: Management of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) requires complex and integrated interventions, usually tailored for each individual due to the wide variety of symptoms that people diagnosed with ASD present. Some of these interventions could be a combination of psychosocial interventions addressed to the management of emotions, the impro...

The seminars are a learning mechanism that serve to complement regular education with more specialized content. Different learning materials are generated from the seminars activity, such as documentation, presentations, videos, exercises… These materials can also be used for teaching purposes in other contexts. The management and distribution of t...

Educational Virtual Worlds (EVWs) provide an interesting and engaging educational platform to promote student learning. Virtual classrooms should be designed to be responsive and adaptive enough to judge the emotional level of the learner and should be capable of providing required support and feed-back to maintain the engagement of the learner to...

The perception that every person has about her health is very important for health, health evolution and therefore for enjoying a healthy life. So, it is important to know what the factors that most influence self-rated health are. If these factors are known, changes that have long term impact on people’s health can be proposed, even for unhealthy...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) arose as a way of transcending formal higher education by realizing technology-enhanced formats of learning and instruction and by granting access to a wide audience way beyond students enrolled in any one Higher Education Institution. However, while MOOCs have been reported as an efficient and important educatio...

The symposium “Challenges of Fingerprinting in Indoor Positioning and Navigation” took place at Barcelona (Spain) on May 3rd and 4th, 2016. The audience comprised academic, scientists, engineers, company representatives, and institutional members. The program offered reports on the state of the art for indoor positioning based on fingerprinting, as...

As a metric, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is important in business environments in order to prioritize customer value to the organization so that effort and resources can be effectively utilized based on the profitability of each customer. In an academic setting there is an equal interest to classify students based on their engagement, so that hig...

Geographical and Fingerprinting Data for Positioning and Navigation Systems: Challenges, Experiences and Technology Roadmap explores the state-of-the-art software tools and innovative strategies to provide a better understanding of positioning and navigation in indoor environments using fingerprinting techniques. The book provides the different pro...

This paper presents the first results of a teaching innovation project named “Emotional Thermometer for Teaching” (ETT) carried out at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. The ETT project intersects the scopes of eLearning and Affective Computing with the aim of collecting and managing emotional information of online students during their learning...

This book gathers the Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Broad-Band Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications, held on November 8–10, 2017 in Barcelona, Spain. Information networking is currently undergoing a rapid evolution. Different kinds of networks with different characteristics are emerging and being integrated in he...

In this chapter, we describe a practical solution for providing all researchers and practitioners in an online university with a unified learning analytics database (LA-DB) containing evidence-based activity data. Our goal is to seamlessly capture all relevant data generated within a virtual learning environment, using a very simple learning record...

Is my professional knowledge outdated? Do I have the skills needed for the new challenges of the society? What knowledge do I lack to qualify for a job I like? What universities can I address to get knowledge that improves my employment expectations? These are relevant questions that all employees have done in any moment of their life. In addition...

Formative assessment tools can benefit from the addition of gamification elements, as stronger engagement may generate further learning opportunities. However, adding gamification elements to such tools may require a significant development effort and leads to few opportunities for re-use, e.g. among different e-learning tools within the same cours...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative web-based eLearning platform called ICT-FLAG that provides e-assessment tools with general-purpose formative assessment services featuring learning analytics and gamification. Design/methodology/approach The paper reports on the technical development of the platform driven by the Refere...

Learning institutions can work in very different manners, but they all share many common and regularly repeated processes. The unambiguous specification of both the processes involved in educational activities and how to adapt such processes to different contexts have not been covered by standards and specifications up to now. Therefore, processes...

The paper presents innovative trustworthy services to support secure e-assessment in web-based collaborative learning grids. Although e-Learning has been widely adopted, there exist still drawbacks which limit their potential. Among these limitations, we investigate information security requirements in on-line assessment learning activities, (e-ass...

The goal of creating analytic systems in order to make companies more competitive is a key element in the enterprise’s success. However, when applied to universities, analytical systems have been less successful. In order to deal with this issue, several approaches have appeared recently, most of them under the umbrella of learning analytics. These...

This paper presents an initial evaluation of an innovative web-based eLearning platform, featuring Learning Analytics and Gamification called ICTFLAG. Previous contributions presented the development and prototyping steps of the platform, and following these steps, this paper reports the evaluation on the first real experience of connecting and int...

This paper presents the implementation and prototyping of an innovative web-based eLearning platform, featuring Learning Analytics and Gamification called ICT-FLAG. A previous contribution presented the analysis and design of the platform. Following the design, this paper implements the platform and reports on the first experiences of connecting an...

Is my professional knowledge outdated? Do I have the skills needed for the new challenges of the society? What knowledge do I lack to qualify for a job I like? What universities can I address to get knowledge that improves my employment expectations? These are relevant questions that an employee has done in any moment of their life. In addition, wh...

Competitive organizations have implemented systems of business intelligence in order to help employees in the process of evidence-based decision-making. Using these systems in university will provide a set of analytical tools that support decision-making of academics focused to the improvement of their research and teaching activities. In the case...

This paper presents the analysis and design of an innovative web-based eLearning platform featuring Learning Analytics and Gamification called ICT-FLAG. A previous contribution presented the software development framework that will guide and support the effective construction of the platform. Following the selected framework, this paper defines the...

Nowadays, universities (on-site and online) have a large competition in order to attract more students. In this panorama, learning analytics can be a very useful tool since it allows instructors (and university managers) to get a more thorough view of their context, to better understand the environment, and to identify potential improvements. In or...

This contribution proposes software infrastructure to support new types of learning methodologies and resources based on collaborative knowledge engineering by means of an innovative application framework called the virtualized collaborative sessions framework (VCSF). The VCSF helps meet challenging collaborative knowledge engineering requirements...

Adaptive e-learning systems are able to automatically generate personalized learning paths from the students' profile. Generally, the student profile is updated with information about knowledge the student has acquired, courses the student has passed and previous work experience. Unfortunately, dealing with courses that students passed in other lea...

Despite their demonstrated potential through a range of early studies, on-line collaborative learning systems do not yet have the impact that many believe is possible. In particular, collaborative learning approaches cannot be readily applied to every e-learning experience, since they require a degree of presence and/or collaboration which may be d...

Research on narrative and interaction with pedagogical studies which refer to disciplines that require strong immersion for the acquisition of knowledge in areas such as museum education lead scholars to question the importance of perspective taking. This work represents the evolution for educational purposes of a narrative video game designed...

This paper proposes the creation of a model-driven development approach on top of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) in order to automate the process of creating Virtual Classrooms. In particular, a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) has been defined for the creation of Virtual Classrooms reusing a specific ontology for Virtual Classrooms. The DSL ha...

This work represents the evolution for educational purposes of a video game designed for the measurement of perspective taking skills. The prototype of the game from which this study started has been developed by the University of Salerno and is aimed at assessing the age at which students develop perspective-taking and mental rotation skills. The...

Adaptive e-learning systems are able to automatically generate personalized learning paths from the students' profile. Generally, the student profile is updated with information about courses the student has passed and previous work experience. Unfortunately, dealing with courses that students passed in other universities is very difficult, error p...

This paper proposes the provision of software infrastructure to support new types of pedagogically and technologically augmented collaborative learning resources by means of an innovative application framework called Virtualized Collaborative Sessions Framework (VCSF). The VCSF approach helps meet challenging pedagogical requirements in online coll...

The use of various types of media and communication technologies in e-learning activities enhances content visualization and user interaction, and increases learner engagement and effectiveness. The evolution of multimedia technologies in recent years has opened new opportunities of integrating multimedia resources to support on-line teaching and l...

Video is a support that is every day more used not only as entertainment but also as a pedagogical resource at any level. On the other hand, video video has become a common way of interacting with internet and each other. Thus, video is nowadays a powerful tool for e-learning students. However, one of the main drawbacks of video versus text documen...

Location-based applications require knowing the user position constantly in order to find out and provide information about user's context. They use GPS signals to locate users, but unfortunately GPS location systems do not work in indoor environments. Therefore, there is a need of new methods that calculate the location of users in indoor environm...

In previous research we proposed a new type of learning object named Collaborative Complex Learning Object (CC-LO) in support for teaching and learning engineering education by the virtualization of live collaborative sessions, with the aim to leverage the knowledge elicited during the collaboration and produce interactive and attractive resources...

In this work we investigate the importance of emotion awareness in e-learning environments, with emphasis to Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) activities. Our presented solution involves a new conceptual model of emotions of interest in e-learning context. In the basis of this model, a computational model has been implemented employi...

The enrichment of computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) systems with emotion awareness features (detect emotion patterns and respond affectively) opens a window towards an authentic social interaction and learning experience. In the current paper, we first review prominent emotion theories and models with respect to learning, detection t...

Smartphones are nowadays a common device with millions of users around the world. They can execute thousands of applications that support any interest of users: productivity, mail access, internet navigation, entertainment, tourism, etc. These applications transform the experience of using a smartphone to something similar to use a pocket extension...

En los últimos años, las tecnologías multimedia se han convertido en un elemento importante en la educación. El uso de diferentes tipos de medios y tecnologías de comunicación multimedia potencía la visualización del contenido y la interacción del usuario, así como la implicación y efectividad del estudiante en su proceso de aprendizaje.

In the area of eLearning the automation of processes from their specifications is still unfeasible. The reason may be the lack of standards and specifications to specify learning processes unambiguously. The work presented in this paper try to solve such problem with two main contributions: the creation of a OKI-OSID metamodel to specify learning p...

The adoption of emotion awareness features in learning environments, has been put on the focus of the research agenda towards students' engagement and their authentic social interaction. In the current paper we provide a solution towards the provision of e-learning with emotion awareness features, which is based on self-reporting of emotions and af...

In order to make improvements to teaching, it is vital to know what students think of the way they are taught. With that purpose in mind, exhaustively analyzing the forums associated with the subjects taught at the Universitat Oberta de Cataluya (UOC) would be extremely helpful, as the university's students often post comments on their learning exp...

Many researchers argue that students must be meaningfully engaged in the learning resources for effective learning to occur. However, current online learners still report a problematic lack of attractive and challenging learning resources that engage them in the learning process. This endemic problem is even more evident in online collaborative lea...

Endowing learning systems with emotion awareness features (capture user’s affective state and provide affective feedback), seems quite promising. This paper describes a system implementation that provides emotion awareness, both explicitly, by self-reporting of emotions through a usable web tool, and implicitly, via sentiment analysis. Prominent th...