José R. Hilera

University of Alcalá | UAH · Department of Computer Sciences

Quality models focused on learning for social and ubiquitous environments are practices that facilitate the construction of learning environments that, integrated with the social web, information technologies and smart mobile devices, will serve as a methodological strategy for the acquisition of a quality learning. Therefore, this article presents...

The increasing number of people are living with disability in the World and their access to formal education is considered a challenge for the development of the online education and educational resources. This problem is considered one of the 17 sustainable development goals that are focused on inclusive and equitable quality education. Neverthele...

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The review of state of the art on creating and managing learning resources and accessible Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) is a topic that cannot only consider formal literature. The evidence and lack of a measurement consensus require the inclusion of contextual information, corroborating scientific results w...

Given the importance of developing and offering accessible education for all, indispensable aspects of education for sustainable development (ESD) are needed. This study addresses that need by proposing a quality self-assessment for virtual education from an accessibility perspective. This proposal is based on previous literature about quality assu...

The lack of accessibility in software products is a problem, which is difficult to solve, due to the absence of accessible support tools and the scarce training of software professionals in accessibility issues that exist today, which has influenced the development of inaccessible programs, causing a large number of people, including those with som...

Software accessibility is a current field of interest. Governments and organizations boost initiatives and legislations to assure universal access. On the other hand, the semantic web is the evolution of the Internet from a web of pages to a web of data. It enables the linked data engineering. It facilitates search of information, data analysis and...

The need for adaptive e-learning environments that respond to learning variability is now a fundamental requirement in education, as it helps to ensure that students learn and pass their courses within a set time frame. Although guidelines, techniques and methods have been established in recent years to contribute to the development of accessible a...

E-learning environments constitute an essential element in education, as they help students to ensure their pass their courses and graduate on time. Although guidelines, techniques, and methods have been presented in some literature in recent years to contribute to the development of accessible e-learning environments that promote digital inclusion...

People with different capacities, such as the deaf and blind, have problems accessing educational content due to lack of accessible technology. Accessibility and usability are closely related concepts that share the goals for a satisfactory user experience. Existing literature establishes a direct relation between accessibility and usability, and r...

Resumen. Para lograr aplicaciones móviles accesibles existe una normativa que establece los requisitos a cumplir con el fin de lograr que cualquier persona pueda utilizar la aplicación, incluidas personas con discapacidad. Esta normativa es de obligado cumplimiento en la Unión Europea por aquellas aplicaciones que hayan sido desarrolladas utilizand...

The use of mobile devices in the classroom is increasingly frequent. However, the LMS are still not completely adapted to this format, preventing students from using all the LMS web-functionalities in their mobiles. Hence, we present and evaluate the use of a new mobile application fully integrated with Learning Management Systems (LMS). We examine...

Video games are software products with several purposes that are growing in strength and weight in society. However, there is one noticeable problem about them; in most cases, their developers most often do not take into consideration people with disabilities when they are creating video game applications. People with disabilities are thus partiall...

Semantic interoperability issues of international e-Government data exchanges have not been solved up until now. In the case of social security institutions, the data exchange operations have some particularities that make that the non-ambiguous definition of core concepts used in the institutions has a key impact on the success and quality of syst...

Contribution: A redesign of the Moodle platform to adapt digital educational content [learning objects (LOs)] to the specific needs of students with disabilities. The approach, extendable to a range of disciplines, was empirically tested with blind and deaf engineering students. Background: Previous studies identified difficulties that blind and de...

La accesibilidad para personas con discapacidad es una característica cada vez más demandada en las TIC. El estudio de su aplicación en la web ha sido el más extendido en el ámbito del software. Con la aparición de nuevas tecnologías como los smartphone, el foco de la accesibilidad debe desplazarse para cubrir estas necesidades en aplicaciones rest...

En este trabajo se presenta una ontología para describir reglas que expresen la forma de evaluar requisitos de accesibilidad que debe cumplir el software, incluidas las páginas y aplicaciones web. Se ha tomado como referencia la futura recomendación del World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) denominada "Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) Rules Format...

Nowadays the governments of several nations must address the challenge of providing a high-quality education for all persons from the perspective of an inclusive focus. In this line, in the e-learning area exist several standards and models aimed at establishing quality guidelines or structures to certify an optimal process of development, implemen...

According to the guidelines provided in the UNESCO program “Learning for All,” the stakeholders (governments, institutions, teachers, instructional designers and quality assurance/ qualification recognition bodies) are responsible on the development of contribution to guarantee the quality access learning for persons with disabilities or special ne...

El presente documento constituye un estudio de la accesibilidad de objetos de aprendizaje acorde a las normativas WCAG 2.0 y sus metadatos de accesibilidad para lo cual se emplea una muestra de 15 objetos de aprendizaje realizados por diferentes instituciones de educación superior del Ecuador. Se considera la importancia del empleo de metadatos de...

The adoption of new technologies for education is changing, and it is reflected for instance, in the use of cloud-based applications for experimental practices in engineering courses and the inclusion of virtual courses in the educational process. Additionally, Educational Institutions are preparing Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as a tool to...

The latest estimates of the World Health Organization point that approximately 5% of world’s population presents disabling hearing loss (328 million adults and 32 million children). This situation becomes very complex in developing countries, where children with hearing loss and deafness rarely have access to schooling. On those grounds, in this pa...

Se presentan conceptos básicos relacionados con la Realidad Virtual y se analiza su posible aplicación en el ámbito docente a través de Internet mediante la creación de sistemas de aprendizaje en forma de mundos virtuales tridimensionales e interactivos. Se valora positivamente la especificación estándar del lenguaje VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling...

La educación enfrenta una constante evolución y la adopción de las nuevas tecnologías de información y comunicación (TICs) en las actividades académicas se refleja en la inclusión de los cursos virtuales en el proceso formativo. Sin embargo factores de accesibilidad de las plataformas y los cursos virtuales no se han tomado en cuenta en el proceso...

This work paper describes a process for automatic combination of testing reports for the accessibility of Web applications, obtained by different testing tools and applying different standards on Web accessibility. Interoperability is guaranteed using semantic Web technologies, which allow describing the reports by RDF (Resource Description Framewo...

En este trabajo se presenta una interfaz de programación de aplicaciones (API) basada en tecnología RESTful, que ofrece de forma remota, a través de la Web, un subconjunto de la funcionalidad de la API Apache Jena para el procesamiento de modelos de conocimiento basados en tecnologías de la Web Semántica. La ventaja de esta nueva Web API es poder e...

This paper presents techniques to evaluate accessibility and usability of mobile applications through a case study, because review and improvement of these properties increase the overall quality of the final software. It discusses the need of using automatic tools and applies the study to a real application. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recomme...

This paper describes a process for automatic combination of testing reports for the accessibility of Web applications, obtained by different testing tools and applying different standards on Web accessibility. Interoperability is guaranteed using semantic Web technologies, which allow describing the reports by RDF (Resource Description Framework) t...

This paper presents a technical solution to improve accessibility in e-learning platforms. The guidelines for the solution were concluded from the analysis of literature with the goal of achieving scalable, reusable, and easily manageable platforms. The method has been tested through a case study conducted on Moodle where a sample of the target pop...

The quality of university education has always been a major concern for all participants involved in the teaching-learning process. The ability to objectively analyze the quality of a subject and to diagnose the aspects that have to be improved has become a necessity, and even more, with the arrival of the European Higher Education Area. The subjec...

Open education has revolutionized the educational environment. Massive open online courses have become the main showcase for open educational resources, but the competition to establish a position in this movement has led to the rapid publication of many courses of arguable quality. This paper presents and analyzes the process of creating a small p...

According to the latest estimates of The United Nations, currently, between 180 and 220 millions of youth (15-24 years) around the world live with some form of disability and approximately 80% of them are from developing countries. Consequently, it is fundamental that youth with disabilities have the same opportunities to access to Higher Education...

The growth of education faces a constant evolution, and the adoption of new technologies for education is reflected in the inclusion of virtual courses in the educational process. However, accessibility in cloud-based applications, virtual platforms and online courses has not been widely taken into account in the educational process. In this sense,...

Nowadays, experiences with massive open online courses (MOOCs) are being part of modern engineering degrees, thus providing practical interactive activities to improve teaching-learning strategies with online courses and social community learning with peers from different countries. Additionally, this MOOC movement is being identified as a valuable...

Nowadays, the implementation of virtual campuses is a reality, both in academic settings and in the workplace. However, there are several challenges associated with the implementation of effective learning outcomes via e-learning. In this chapter in particular, the use of e-learning to reach students with disabilities and the barriers that they may...

Purpose – This paper aims to present an approach to achieve accessible and inclusive Virtual Education for all, but especially intended for students with disabilities. This work proposes main steps to take into consideration for stakeholders involved in the educational process related to an inclusive e-Learning. Design/methodology/approach – The p...

Virtual learning in engineering education uses e-learning resources in many different ways. These resources are normally stored in learning object repositories (LOR) where they are catalogued with metadata facilitating retrieval by end users. As ranking e-learning resources according to quality criteria is considered helpful for end users, quality...

Constant evolution of technology triggers a large myriad of research related to accessibility in Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). In the same way, international initiatives provide guidelines to create accessible web content, but educational institutions, especially in Latin-America (LA), are not aware of the VLE barriers that could affect stud...

Purpose – This paper aims to present the state of play of semantic interoperability problems in social security data exchanges. Design/methodology/approach – The subject is presented as an open issue and taking into account the circumstances of the exchanges. Electronic exchanges in European Union social security are used as a case study. Finding...

Information exchange constitutes a key operation in social security systems. In this context, semantic interoperability is fundamental in the development of joint definitions and interpretations concerning the data which is to be processed by various organisms. One of the main methods to handling of semantic conflicts are controlled vocabularies an...

The use of mobile devices is increasing in recent years, and their characteristics are different from those of computers (keyboard and screen size, interaction method, etc.), so it is important to specifically study the usability of these devices. This paper presents an experiment carried out with users to find the correct length (from the point of...

This article describes a study conducted to evaluate the accessibility of the contents of the Web sites of some of the most important universities in Spain and the rest or the world, according with three international rankings. Universities included simultaneously in “Academic Ranking of World Universities”, in “Times Higher Education Supplement” a...

The Web was created as a universal network of knowledge. It represented a huge qualitative and quantitative leap in terms of acquisition and processing of information. However, even today, significant barriers make difficult the access of a large number of citizens to the web, including disabled users and old people with diminished skills as an eff...

The paper presents the most important concepts of interoperability and analyse the problems to apply interoperability in Social Security information systems. A model for apply interoperability between Social Security Institutions is presented and is proved in some scenarios. The goal is to develop standardize specifications promoting reusability an...

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This article presents a case study for the project “E-Inclusion to people with disabilities. Implementation of accessibility standards in the process of course design in virtual learning environments”, the objective of the project is to develop an innovative on-line educational program through pilot course experimentation, introducing key competenc...

Readability refers to the ease of reading and understanding a text. The need to ensure the readability of Web pages is related to universal access to products and services in the information society, which aims to provide an Internet for all. This article describes a study conducted to assess the readability of textual contents of Web portals of 40...

Various issues related to social security information exchanges between different countries are analyzed and the European Union solution, named Eessi project (Electronic Exchange of Social Security), is described. One of the key components of Eessi is the so-called Master directory, which manages information about institutions participating in info...

This paper presents a solution to the need of capturing and recording how the learner interacts with a mobile device while navigating a web-based learning object. For this, software with similar features has been studied, looking for its strengths and weaknesses, and a software has been developed, which meets most of the requirements that might be...

Nowadays there are a lot of standards, specifications and recommendations developed by different organizations, which the aim of providing a common framework in order to regulate the various aspects related to the development and use of e-learning environments. This paper provides a compilation of major e-learning standards that exist today, and al...

Quality applied to e-learning should be achieved thanks to the implementation of a quality standard in the structural organization which provides an on-line education system. A generic quality standard could be adopted, but specific quality standards focused on e-learning have been developed. The internal similarities and differences that can be fo...

In this paper, an automatic transformation tool between different content packaging specifications is proposed. The aim of this tool is to serve as a gateway for independent, heterogeneous Learning Management Systems, thus achieving interoperability. The tool is designed to support all existing content packaging specifications, but in this paper we...

Quality is at the heart of education and training in all countries. Knowledge, information, and learning technologies are seen as a vital tool for achieving this. The promises of e‐learning are to open up our systems to the world, improve access for all, and increase learning effectiveness. In addition, knowledge, information, and learning technolo...

This paper presents an experience in the use of technologies and mobile games to improve programming skills. Improvement of students' achievement is evaluated to check how this kind of experiences can help them to pass their programming-related courses in information engineering degrees. MobiGame contest is the central point of students' work. In t...

This article describes a study conducted by the authors to evaluate the accessibility and read ability of the con tents of the Web sites of seven universities in Finland. The accessibility assessment has been carried out to check k compliance wit h accessibility guidelines for Web content established b y the World Wide Web Consortium recommendation...

A learning design is the result of the description of a teaching-learning process. It implies the consideration of aspects such as the context in which teaching is being developed, the most suitable teaching method in this context, the necessary resources, the contents of the training activity, or the assessment criteria. IMS-LD is a specification...

In the late 1990's, there was substantial activity within the "Web engineering" research community and a multitude of new Web approaches were proposed. However, numerous studies have revealed major gaps in these approaches, including coverage and interoperability. In order to address these gaps, the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm offers a...

This paper presents a semiautomatic evaluation method of usability in websites. Expert review is done in this case using a template based on the ISO 9241-151 guidelines that provides numerical and graphical results. Such results permit to observe the aspects of usability that are missed on the evaluated website. This template has many applications...

This paper proposes an approach for Web requirements validation by applying the model-driven paradigm in classical requirements validation techniques. In particular, we present how the Navigational Development Techniques (NDT) approach exploits the model-driven paradigm to improve its requirements validation task by exploring tool cases that system...

The assessment in e-learning systems is a basic element to successfully complete any formative action. In this article we present a generic, flexible, interoperable and reusable language for design assessments, and its implementation in the EDVI Learning Management System. This language is based on XML and we have used XML Schema technology. We als...

Nowadays, the digital register process of electrocardiographical signals (ECG) constitutes a common practice for the diagnosis and controlling of patients suffering from cardiac disorders. In this paper we study the usefulness of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for clinical diagnosis through the detection of arrythmias and the reduction of the larg...

The International Organización for Standardization has decided to develop a new metadata standard for learning resources. This standard claims to enhance the compatibility, flexibility and focus on the user requirements. This article presents the new ISO/IEC MLR standard, describes it and compares the MLR data elements to those defined in Dublin Co...

This paper presents XSL source code to automatically produce a Unit of Learning manifest with a standard IMS-LD format, from the activity diagram with UML format that represents its workflow. Besides, a complementary XSL source code that performs the reverse process, namely to automatically obtain the activity diagram from the unit of learning mani...

In this paper we propose a system that allows to adapt educational contents to learners, based on the knowledge of a learner who is conducting the training through his mobile device, contents will also be tailored to the features of the device and to the context where the learner is at the present moment. Keywords-m-learning; adaptation; learning o...

The process for creating learning contents using reusable learning objects (LOs) can be broken down into two sub-processes: LO finding and LO sequencing. Finding can be automated by the use of federated search engines along with gap analysis techniques; however, sequencing is usually performed by instructors, who create courses targeting generic pr...

This article proposes a system for unification of interfaces of learning objects in m-learning, and it explains the part which is currently being developed in a doctoral dissertation.