José A. Ruipérez-Valiente

University of Murcia | UM · Information and Communication Engineering

When massive open online courses (MOOCs) first captured global attention in 2012, advocates imagined a disruptive transformation in postsecondary education. Video lectures from the world's best professors could be broadcast to the farthest reaches of the networked world, and students could demonstrate proficiency using innovative computer-graded as...

Learning games have great potential to become an integral part of new classrooms of the future. One of the key reported benefits is the capacity to keep students deeply engaged during their learning process. Therefore, it is necessary to develop models that can measure quantitatively how learners are engaging with learning games to inform game desi...

Recent studies of massive open online courses (MOOCs) have focused on global providers such as edX, Coursera, and FutureLearn, with less attention to local initiatives that target regional learners. In this study we combine data from the main edX platform and one regional MOOC provider, Edraak in Jordan, to explore differences in learners’ behavior...

Collaboration is considered as one of the main drivers of learning and it has been broadly studied across numerous contexts, including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The research on MOOCs has risen exponentially during the last years and there have been a number of works focused on studying collaboration. However, these previous studies have...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) remarkably attracted global media attention, but the spotlight has been concentrated on a handful of English-language providers. While Coursera, edX, Udacity, and FutureLearn received most of the attention and scrutiny, an entirely new ecosystem of local MOOC providers was growing in parallel. This ecosystem is h...

The quality of education hinges on the proficiency and training of educators. Due to the importance of teacher training, the innovative platform Teacher Moments creates simulated classroom scenarios. In this scenario‐based learning, confusion is an important indicator to detect users who struggle with the simulations. Through Teacher Moments, we ga...

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and sensors are significantly impacting multiple areas, including education and workplaces. Following the PRISMA methodology, this review explores the current status of using AI to support the training and assessment of professionals. We examined 83 research papers, analyzing: (1) the targeted professionals,...

In the digital era, the internet and social media have transformed communication but have also facilitated the spread of hate speech and disinformation, leading to radicalization, polarization, and toxicity. This is especially concerning for media outlets due to their significant role in shaping public discourse. This study examines the topics, sen...

In this research, we introduce a novel open-source labeling tool, the Game-Based Assessment (GBA) Labeling Tool, specifically designed to address current challenges for data labeling in GBA scenarios. This web-based application facilitates the annotation of audio, video, and game event data, offering three different types of annotations – global, t...

The prevalence of misinformation and disinformation poses a significant challenge in today's digital landscape. That is why several methods and tools are proposed to analyze and understand these phenomena from a scientific perspective. To assess how the mis/disinformation is being conceptualized and evaluated in the literature, this paper surveys t...

In the digital era, the internet and social media have revolutionized communication but pose new challenges. Hate speech or disinformation has become a global concern, impacting society, democracy, and individual rights. This paper analyzes the topics, sentiments, and prevalence of hate in 620,207 news articles, news headlines, website comments and...

Serious Games (SGs) enable the collection of valuable student interaction data, allowing for the analysis of student performance through Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, the lack of explainability in AI models represents a significant challenge. This research aims to create an interpretable model capable of predicting students' real-time perf...

As cyber threats continue to evolve, the need for highly skilled cyber defence operators becomes increasingly critical. In this work, we aim to provide a multidisciplinary exploration into the current educational landscape, focusing on the following pivotal areas: cyber defence educational initiatives, digital skills, technological enablers, and et...

The affordances that generative artificial intelligence can have in mis/disinformation contexts are major threats to our digitalized society. We present a research framework to generate customized agent-based social networks for disinformation simulations that would enable understanding and evaluating the phenomena.

Background Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more useful as a decision-making and outcomes predictor tool. We have developed AI models to predict surgical complexity and the postoperative course in laparoscopic liver surgery for segments 7 and 8. Methods We included patients with lesions located in segments 7 and 8 operated by minimally inv...

Video games have assumed an important place in our daily lives. This has led to an increasing interest on the use of games for non-entertainment purposes, introducing the concept of Serious Games (SGs). In particular, SGs are being explored because of their potential to provide reliable assessments, but also because they can measure competences tha...

In our generation, there is an undoubted rise in the use of social media and specifically photo and video sharing platforms. These sites have proved their ability to yield rich data sets through the users’ interaction which can be used to perform a data‐driven evaluation of capabilities. Nevertheless, this study reveals the lack of suitable data se...

Managing stress is a crucial soft skill that affects cognitive performance and health. Stress detection through biometrics can be used to improve and evaluate stress management. However, measuring the effects of stress on biometrics and executive functions is difficult and dependent on the individual. Despite these challenges, this paper presents a...

Over the last decade, there has been a large amount of research on technology-enhanced learning (TEL), including the exploration of sensor-based technologies. This research area has seen significant contributions from various conferences, including the European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL). In this research, we present a comp...

During the last few years, there has been increasing attention paid to serious games (SGs), which are games used for non‐entertainment purposes. SGs offer the potential for more valid and reliable assessments compared to traditional methods such as paper‐and‐pencil tests. However, the incorporation of assessment features into SGs is still in its ea...

In the current postdigitalage, where data has become increasingly ubiquitous, the management of data has emerged as a vital aspect of digital literacies, particularly for active citizenry. This article introduces a Data Literacy framework that emphasizes the importance of an ideological emancipatory vision of data literacy for critical citizenry. T...

The rapid technological evolution of the last years has motivated students to develop capabilities that will prepare them for an unknown future in the 21st century. In this context, many teachers intend to optimise the learning process, making it more dynamic and exciting through the introduction of gamification. Thus, this paper focuses on a data-...

We collected and computed various data and statistics from a sample of Flickr users who uploaded photos to the platform in December 2021 and their photos, obtaining a final number of 27,516 users and 2,647,928 photos. Having the total number of photos uploaded and the number of photos uploaded in December by each user, we selected a representative...

Games are increasingly being recognized as valuable tools for learning. In addition, they are also being explored for their potential to provide valid and reliable assessments, as they allow to create authentic and engaging assessment contexts through interactive and immersive environments. However, there are challenges to enable Game-based Assessm...

During the past decade, there has been growing interest among researchers in informal learning at scale, particularly in the area of expert finding. These platforms have played a fundamental role in facilitating informal learning at scale, by providing access to diverse expertise and knowledge resources that might not otherwise be available to lear...

In our generation, there is an undoubted rise in the use of social media and specifically photo and video sharing platforms. These sites have proved their ability to yield rich data sets through the users' interaction which can be used to perform a data-driven evaluation of capabilities. Nevertheless, this study reveals the lack of suitable data se...

The irreplaceable key to the triumph of Question & Answer (Q & A) platforms is their users providing high-quality answers to the challenging questions posted across various topics of interest. From more than a decade, the expert finding problem attracted much attention in information retrieval research. Based on the encountered gaps in the expert i...

This paper describes the organization and results of several MOOCs delivered about technical topics (i.e., digital electronics, VHDL design on FPGAs, open education and OERs repositories and the use of STEAM technologies to encourage diversity and inclusion), where online laboratories have been used in some of them. An analysis of the enrollment, s...

This paper presents a general-purpose method for detecting cheating in online courses, which combines anomaly detection and supervised machine learning. Using features that are rooted in Psychometrics and Learning Analytics literature, and capture anomalies in learner behavior and response patterns, we demonstrate that a classifier that is trained...

The purpose of this special section is to collect in one place how data in game-based learning environments may be turned into valuable analytics for student assessment, support of learning, and/or improvement of the game, using existing or emerging empirical research methodologies from various fields, including computer science, software engineeri...

Since the appearance of the Internet, many traditional businesses have been transformed, across the areas of shopping, advertising, education, entertainment, and more [...]

Lay Description What is already known about this topic? Online learning has grown significantly during the last decade. This growth increases the need for online assessment methods that can provide a valid, reliable, and fair measure of student knowledge. Research demonstrated the prevalence of academic dishonesty in online learning. There is a ti...

Game‐based assessment (GBA), a specific application of games for learning, has been recognized as an alternative form of assessment. While there is a substantive body of literature that supports the educational benefits of GBA, limited work investigates the validity and generalizability of such systems. In this paper, we describe applications of le...

Technology is gradually becoming an integral part of learning at all levels of educational. This includes the now pervasive presence of virtual learning environments (VLEs) and the inclusion of interactive devices used or worn by learners or that are present in the physical classroom environment. These new technology-rich educational ecosystems hav...

This article presents the SmartFC mobile application, an application aimed at students which allows the implementation of the flipped classroom model compatible with the use of ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) even in conditions of low or no connectivity. This proposal not only allows the visualization of open educational resources...

This article presents the SmartFC mobile application, an application aimed at students which allows the implementation of the flipped classroom model compatible with the use of ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) even in conditions of low or no connectivity. This proposal not only allows the visualization of open educational resources...

When stress is improperly managed over time, it may lead to various medical, psychological, and behavioral problems. This chapter proposes applying artificial intelligence models in the workplace to control and manage workers’ stress through the heart rate. However, many of the devices used in the research literature to measure heart rate are too i...

One of the main challenges that we face with MOOCs is that certain disciplines need more practical activities, usually carried out in physical environments, which is difficult to supply only with the use of videos or readings. It is here where virtual and remote laboratories play a great role, mechanisms that allow students to carry out practical e...

Background Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have touted the idea of democratizing education, but soon enough, this utopian idea collided with the reality of finding sustainable business models. In addition, the promise of harnessing interactive and social web technologies to promote meaningful learning was only partially successful. And finally,...

Previous research and experiences have indicated the potential that games have in educational settings. One of the possible uses of games in education is as game-based assessments (GBA), using game tasks to generate evidence about skills and content knowledge that can be valuable. There are different approaches in the literature to implement the as...

Background Small private online courses (SPOCs) are one of the strategies to introduce the massive open online courses (MOOCs) within the university environment and to have these courses validates for academic credit. However, numerous researchers have highlighted that academic dishonesty is greatly facilitated by the online context in which SPOCs...

In the twentyfirst-century society, several soft skills are fundamental, such as stress management, which is considered one of the key ones due to its strong relationship with health and well-being. However, this skill is hard to measure and master without external support. This paper tackles stress detection through artificial intelligence (AI) mo...

Background: The management of a vascular injury during cholecystectomy is still very complicated, especially in centers not specialized in complex hepatobiliary surgery. Methods: This was a multi-institutional retrospective study in patients with vascular injuries during cholecystectomy from 18 centers in 4 countries. The aim of the study was to...

The recent pandemic has changed the way we see education. During recent years, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers, such as Coursera or edX, are reporting millions of new users signing up on their platforms. Though online review systems are standard among many verticals, no standardized or fully decentralized review systems exist in the MOO...

Technology has become an essential part of our everyday life, and its use in educational environments keeps growing. In addition, games are one of the most popular activities across cultures and ages, and there is ample evidence that supports the benefits of using games for assessment. This field is commonly known as game-based assessment (GBA), wh...

Background: Iatrogenic bile duct injury (IBDI) is a challenging surgical complication. IBDI management can be guided by artificial intelligence models. Our study identified the factors associated with successful initial repair of IBDI and predicted the success of definitive repair based on patient risk levels. Methods: This is a retrospective mu...

The digitalization of education has been continuously growing and deeply transforming some of the core practices across all teaching and learning levels. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic had an accelerating effect on this process. In this sense, one of the most disruptive media over the last decade to democratize digital education has been massive...

Over the last decade, we have seen a large amount of research being performed in technology-enhanced learning. Within this area, the use of digital assessment has been gaining a lot of popularity. In this work, the researchers aim to identify the main topics in this area within the last 15 years, proposing a new methodology to perform a text analyt...

This chapter uncovers the opportunities that online media portals like content sharing and consumption sites or photography sites have for informal learning. The authors explored online portals that can provide evidence of evaluating, inferring, measuring skills, and/or contributing to the development of competencies and capabilities of the 21 st c...

The exponential growth of technology is transforming most existing sectors in the world. One of the technologies that are impacting significantly our society is video games, which have become a new cultural form of expression. Moreover, the research suggests that especially within educational contexts they present great learning opportunities. Howe...

Although energy concepts and climate change are highly present on everyone's life, educational systems are in cases still lacking on their curricula the teaching of what energy is, how it is produced, and what is the relationship between energy use and climate change. It is suggested by the many that a society which is not literate about energy wil...

The irreplaceable key to the triumph of Question & Answer (Q&A) platforms is their users providing high-quality answers to the challenging questions posted across various topics of interest. Recently, the expert finding problem attracted much attention in information retrieval research. In this work, we inspect the feasibility of supervised learnin...

Nowadays, the use of technology in continuously increasing, making a significant impact in almost every area, including education. New areas have gained much popularity in the last years in educational technology (EdTech), such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) or computer-supported collaborative learning. In addition, research and interest in...

This article presents the SmartFC mobile application, an application aimed at students which allows the implementation of the flipped classroom model compatible with the use of ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) even in conditions of low or no connectivity. This proposal not only allows the visualization of open educational resources...

The recent pandemic has changed the way we see education. It is not surprising that children and college students are not the only ones using online education. Millions of adults have signed up for online classes and courses during last years, and MOOC providers, such as Coursera or edX, are reporting millions of new users signing up in their platf...

The rapid evolution of technology directly impacts the skills and jobs needed in the next decade. Users can, intentionally or unintentionally, develop different skills by creating, interacting with, and consuming the content from online environments and portals where informal learning can emerge. These environments generate large amounts of data; t...

Technology has become an essential part of our everyday life, and its use in educational environments keeps growing. In addition, games are one of the most popular activities across cultures and ages, and there is ample evidence that supports the benefits of using games for assessment. This field is commonly known as game-based assessment (GBA), wh...

The use of learning analytics (LA) in educational technology has emerged as a key interest to researchers with the promise that this technology will help teachers and schools make data-informed decisions that were not feasible without big data and AI-driven algorithms. Despite its potential, LA has not yet effectively connected research and practic...

The emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) broadened the educational landscape by providing free access to quality learning materials for anyone with a device connected to the Internet. However, open access does not guarantee equals opportunities to learn, and research has repetitively reported that learners from affluent countries benefi...

Within the online advertising ecosystem, viewability is defined as the metric that measures if an ad impression had the chance of being viewable by a potential consumer. Although this metric has been presented as a potential game-changer within the ad industry, it has not been fully adopted by the stakeholders, mainly due to disagreement between th...

Over the last decade, we have seen a large amount of research being performed in technology-enhanced learning. The European Conference on Technology-enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) is one of the conferences with the most extended trajectory in this area. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the last ten years of the conference. We collect...

The rapid technological evolution of the last years motivated students to develop competencies and capabilities that will prepare them for an unknown future of the 21st century. In this context, teachers intend to optimise the process of learning and make it more dynamic and exciting by introducing gamification. Thus, this paper focuses on a data-d...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer online courses at low cost for anyone with an internet access. At its early days, the MOOC movement raised the flag of democratizing education, but soon enough, this utopian idea collided with the need to find sustainable business models. Moving from open access to a new financially sustainable certificatio...

Conference proceeding of the EMOCs 2021 confernce in Potsdam (Germany)

This paper describes the architecture of an Arduino remote lab that supports the deployment of many Arduino-based experiments, such as a sensors remote lab consisting on eleven sensors and a LCD display connected to an Arduino MEGA, or a 3D RGB LED cube remote lab consisting on 16 RGB LEDs connected to an Arduino UNO-compatible board. The proposed...

Social media interactions represent one of the primary methods to connect and interact with others, and people rely on them as a primary source of news and information in general. Despite considering these contents as trustworthy knowledge, social media manipulation has been demonstrated as one of the most significant problems of the 21st century....

Technology has become an integral part of our everyday life, and its use in educational environments keeps growing. Additionally, video games are one of the most popular mediums across cultures and ages. There is ample evidence that supports the benefits of using games for learning and assessment, and educators are mainly supportive of using games...

The emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) broadened the educational landscape by providing free access to quality learning materials for anyone with a device connected to the Internet. However, open access does not guarantee equals opportunities to learn, and research has repetitively reported that learners from affluent countries benefi...