Juan I. Asensio-Pérez

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Valladolid

The growing call to foster interdisciplinary learning has found educators struggling to co-design learning across disciplinary boundaries. Aiming to contribute to the area of interdisciplinary learning design, we explored how to support educators in co-designing interdisciplinary projects integrating Educational Robotics (ER) and Arts, hereafter ca...

The recent Covid-19 pandemic made universities rethink their traditional educational models, shifting, in some cases, to pure online or hybrid models. Hybrid settings usually involve onsite (i.e., in the classroom) and online (e.g., in a different classroom, at home) students simultaneously under the instruction of the same teacher. However, while...

Feedback plays an integral role in the learning process serving as a vital component for improvement and motivation. Typically, teachers provide feedback by considering various factors, such as the specific course context, the timing, and learners’ needs. However, when designing feedback in settings like Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), challen...

Reward-based gamification strategies are proposed as a promising technique to increase student engagement in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), following its success in other small-scale educational settings. However, these strategies imply a number of orchestration tasks (e.g., design, management) that are usually carried out by instructors, and...

There is a deluge of Cultural Heritage Linked Open Data containing detailed information (e.g., location, architectural styles, etc.). Teachers could use this Open Data to generate meaningful learning tasks. However, most teachers are not using this information. This may be because they are not aware of these information sources or because they have...

The provision of personalized and timely feedback can become challenging when shifting from face-to-face to online learning. Feedback is not only about providing support to students, but also about identifying when and which students need what kind of support. Usually, educators carry out such activities manually. However, the manual identification...

This paper presents Casual Learn, an application that proposes ubiquitous learning tasks about Cultural Heritage. Casual Learn exploits a dataset of 10,000 contextualized learning tasks that were semiautomatically generated out of open data from the Web. Casual Learn offers these tasks to learners according to their physical location. For example,...

Detecting learners who face problems in MOOCs usually poses difficulties due to the high instructor-learners ratio, the diversity of the population, and the asynchronous participation mode. Existing solutions mainly draw on self-reported problems in discussion forums and on dashboards displaying learners’ activity traces. However, these approaches...

Educawood is a socio-semantic annotation system intended for environmental learning in Secondary and Higher Education. It can be used to socially annotate trees and other ecosystem structures such as dead wood. Furthermore, Educawood allows the exploration of existing semantic datasets of land cover maps and forestry inventories as well as social t...

This paper presents a case study that analyzes the orchestration of a ubiquitous learning situation involving a teacher and 89 secondary-school students using Casual Learn. This case study allows us to illustrate how teachers can use Casual Learn to orchestrate ubiquitous learning situations to learn Cultural Heritage. During the case study, Casual...

This demo paper presents SCARLETT, a Smart Learning Environment designed to track the evolution of learners across formal and informal contexts in order to provide personal support to learners. SCARLETT benefits from a variety of Technology Enhanced Learning systems and tools for collecting information about the students actions across physical and...

Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) competence is imperative to academic achievement. For reflective academic writing tasks, which are common for university assessments, this is especially the case since students are often required to plan the task independently to be successful. The purpose of the current study was to examine different reflection behavi...

This paper proposes a template-based approach to semi-automatically create contextualized learning tasks out of several sources from the Web of Data. The contextualization of learning tasks opens the possibility of bridging formal learning that happens in a classroom, and informal learning that happens in other physical spaces, such as squares or h...

This paper presents a dataset of a collaborative learning situation. Students were enrolled in two undergradute courses on computer networks where they were required to carry out a set of learning activities supported by Moodle and an on-line collaborative environment called CoTrackV2. The data collected includes logs of the writing process of shar...

Smart learning environments (SLEs) have gained considerable momentum in the last 20 years. The term SLE has emerged to encompass a set of recent trends in the field of educational technology, heavily influenced by the growing impact of technologies such as cloud services, mobile devices, and interconnected objects. However, the term SLE has been us...

The use of Conversational Agents (CAs) in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has shown promising results regarding students’ productive dialogue and learning. Yet, limited work has explored the connection between the configuration of the CA behavior, the nature of the learning task, and the student behavior in authentic educational se...

Smart Learning promises the connection between formal and informal learning, but how to offer informal learning tasks related to formal learning is still a challenge. This demonstration paper presents CasualLearn, a smart learning application that bridges formal and informal learning to learn History of Art in the Spanish region of Castile and Leon...

The research field of Learning Design (LD) has been active for some time now, but several questions remain open for the scientific community. In particular, the article tackles issues that have been core concerns in LD over the years: (1) how to support the different phases of the LD process; (2) what representations should be used in the various s...

Smart Education requires bridging formal and informal learning experience. However, how to create contextualized learning resources that support this bridging remains a problem. In this paper, we propose to exploit the open data available in the Web to automatically create contextualized learning resources. Our preliminary results are promising, as...

Smart Education promises personalized learning experiences that bridge formal and informal learning. Our proposal is to exploit the Web of Data to automatically create learning resources that can be, later on, recommended to a learner based on her learning interests and context. For example, a student enrolled in an arts course can get recommendati...

Peer review is one approach to facilitate formative feedback exchange in MOOCs; however, it is often undermined by low participation. To support effective implementation of peer reviews in MOOCs, this research work proposes several predictive models to accurately classify learners according to their expected engagement levels in an upcoming peer-re...

Lack of timely instructors’ support when the learners are struggling with the course contents and activities is one frequent problem of MOOC learners. The early identification of these learners could help instructors spend part of their limited time assisting them and avoid potential dropouts. This paper presents a MOOC case study that explores the...

Despite the advantages of MOOCs, such as the open and free access to education, these courses are criticized for students’ lack of motivation and their high dropout rates. Gamification is a technique used to increase student motivation and engagement in small-scale educational contexts. However, the effects of gamification on student engagement hav...

With the aim of supporting instructional designers in setting up collaborative learning activities in MOOCs, this paper derives prediction models for student participation in group discussions. The salient feature of these models is that they are built using only data prior to the learning activity, and can thus provide actionable predictions, as o...

Despite the benefits of MOOCs (e.g., open access to education offered by prestigious universities), the low level of student engagement remains as an important issue causing massive dropouts in such courses. The use of reward-based gamification strategies is one approach to promote student engagement and prevent dropout. However, there is a lack of...

This paper presents the findings of a mixed-methods research that explored the potentials emerging from aligning learning design (LD) and learning analytics (LA) during the design of a predictive analytics solution and from involving the instructors in the design process. The context was a past massive open online course, where the learner data and...

Smart Learning Environments hold promise of adapting learning processes to the individual context of students and connecting formal with non-formal learning. To do so, SLEs need to know the current context of the students, regardless of the physical or virtual space where learning takes place. This paper presents an architecture that assists in the...

This article describes a study of online collaborative design in the context of teacher professional development. Twenty-five teachers from different Spanish universities participated in the online course. The aim was to understand how to support teachers in interuniversity teams to collaborate fully online throughout the learning design process of...

While parameter sweep simulations can help undergraduate students and researchers to understand computer networks, their usage in the academia is hindered by the significant computational load they convey. This paper proposes DNSE3, a service oriented computer network simulator that, deployed in a cloud computing infrastructure, leverages its elast...

Although the massive and open nature of MOOCs necessitates more technology support for instructors, existing prediction research has been barely capable of offering real-world solutions. One critical case where MOOC instructors could benefit from real-time technological support is the design of collaborative activities, in particular group formatio...

Learning Design (LD) research is oriented to support teachers in designing their teaching with the aim to provide a sound pedagogical background and to make effective use of resources and technologies. In spite of the significant number of LD approaches and tools proposed so far, their adoption is still very limited and this represents an unsolved...

Learning design tools aim at supporting practitioners in their task of creating more innovative and effective computer-supported learning situations. Despite there being a myriad of proposed tools, their use presents challenges that recent studies link with practitioners' varied pedagogical approaches and context restrictions, as well as with barri...

In blended learning scenarios, evidence needs to be gathered from digital and physical spaces to obtain a more complete view of the teaching and learning processes. However, these scenarios are highly heterogeneous, and the varying data sources available in each particular context can condition the accuracy, relevance, interpretability and actionab...

Several studies have explored how to help teachers carry out learning situations involving Augmented Reality (AR), a technology that has shown different affordances for learning. However, these proposals tend to rely on specific types of AR, focus on particular types of spaces, and are generally disconnected from other technologies widely used in e...

Accurate link quality predictions are key in community wireless mesh networks (CWMNs) to improve the performance of routing protocols. Unlike other techniques, online machine learning algorithms can be used to build link quality predictors that are adaptive without requiring a predeployment effort. However, the use of these algorithms to make link...

Las simulaciones de barridos de parámetros tienen un gran potencial en el estudio de redes telemáticas, especialmente en contextos docentes. Sin embargo, el elevado tiempo necesario habitualmente para completar este tipo de simulaciones es una limitación importante para su uso. En este artículo se propone DNSE3, un entorno que permite la ejecución...

Although MOOCs are being established as a very popular technology to support learning, they are often criticized for their lack of support to active pedagogies and the high drop-out rates. One approach to face this problem is gamification, due to the promising benefits already shown at small-scale environments. Attending to the current and growing...

Peer review has been an effective approach for the assessment of massive numbers of student artefacts in MOOCs. However, low student participation is a barrier that can result in inefficiencies in the implementation of peer reviews, disrupting student learning. In this regard, knowing earlier the estimate number of peer works that students will rev...

Recent research suggests that training teachers as learning designers helps promote technology-enhanced educational innovations. However, little attention has been paid so far to the interplay between the effectiveness of Teacher Professional Development (TPD) instructional models promoting the role of “teachers as designers” and the capabilities (...

MOOCs can bring together thousands of students with different background in the same course. This fact presents a good opportunity for instructors to design and enact collaborative activities that may involve groups. However, MOOCs present some drawbacks that can hinder the completion of this kind of activities such as the high drop-out rates, the...

Despite the educational affordances that ubiquitous learning has shown, it is still hampered by several orchestration difficulties. One of these difficulties is that teachers lose awareness of what the students perform across the multiple technologies and spaces involved. Monitoring can help in such awareness, and it has been highly explored in fac...

Technology offers rich opportunities for learning across different physical and virtual spaces. However, most of current across-spaces proposals are either highly teacher-centered, inflexible in the students’ self-management of learning artifacts during the enactment, or allow the teacher little/no control of such students’ management of artifacts....

Teachers usually implement their pedagogical ideas in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) in a continuous refinement approach also known as “bricolage”. Recently, different proposals have enabled the ubiquitous access to VLEs, thus extending the bricolage mode of operation to other learning spaces. However, such proposals tend to present several l...

p class="3">This paper presents We-Share, a social annotation application that enables educators to publish and retrieve information about educational ICT tools. As a distinctive characteristic, We-Share provides educators data about educational tools already available on the Web of Data while allowing them to enrich such data with their experience...

This chapter draws a picture of the variety of representations that have been proposed to support the learning design life cycle. The intent is to show that such representations have different features and serve different purposes and that designers may find it useful to adopt one or the other according to their objectives and/or at different stage...

Gamification is an emerging technique with potential benefits in different educational approaches. This is the case of ubiquitous learning, where gamification can help drive different students' behaviors and increase their engagement while learning across physical and virtual spaces. Unfortunately, the proposals supporting teachers to create gamifi...

Community platforms and repositories enable educators to share and reuse Learning Design solutions (resources, activities, patterns, courses, etc.) The Integrated Learning Design Environment (ILDE) is a community platform that integrates Learning Design tools allowing not only sharing but also (co-)editing designs of resources and activities and th...

Technologies such as augmented Reality (AR), 3D Virtual Worlds (3DVWs) and mobile phones are extending education to other spaces beyond the classroom or the Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). However, the richness of across-spaces learning situations that could be conducted in all these spaces is hampered by the difficulties (encompassed under t...

The term 'orchestrating learning' is being used increasingly often, referring to the coordination activities performed while applying learning technologies to authentic settings. However, there is little consensus about how this notion should be conceptualised, and what aspects it entails. In this paper, a conceptual framework for orchestration-rel...

Recent technological advances in mobile devices enable the connection of classrooms with other virtual and physical spaces. Some approaches aim at helping teachers carry out learning situations across such spaces. However, these proposals tend to be isolated from other activities in teachers’ current common practices, and do not allow teacher-contr...

ePortfolios are recognized as effective tools for formative assessment. Learn- ing outcomes are demonstrated by a number of work samples, which provide a good overview, not only of the acquired competences, but also of the path followed to get there. However, ePortfolios do no provide means for their automatic integration in Distributed Learning En...

Several approaches provide solutions for orchestrating across-spaces learning situations involving heterogeneous technologies. However, the learning situations that such systems support tend to be isolated from other activities and ICT tools of the teachers' existing practice. We present some lessons learned during our research in the field, which...

During the last decades, educational contexts have transformed into complex technological and social ecologies, with mobile devices expanding the scope of education beyond the traditional classroom, creating so-called Ubiquitous Learning Environments (ULEs). However, these new technological opportunities entail an additional burden for teachers, wh...

This study critically reviews the recently published scientific literature on Linked Data proposals in the educational field. After systematically searching online bibliographic databases, 33 original works satisfied the scope and quality criteria, and thus were included in this review. Studies were classified with respect to TEL research areas; in...

Different approaches have explored how to provide seamless learning across multiple ICT-enabled physical and virtual spaces, including three-dimensional virtual worlds (3DVW). However, these approaches present limitations that may reduce their acceptance in authentic educational practice: The difficulties of authoring and sharing teacher-created de...

ICT tools offer the possibility to store, analyse and visualise large amounts of educational data. However, in order to make sense of these analyses, teachers need meaningful information connected to their pedagogical intentions. We envision an enriched learning-design process, which supports the integration of the issues related to monitoring in t...

GLUE! is an integration architecture that allows teachers to easily set up an LMS environment with several external tools to carry out complex collaborative learning situations in distance settings. Though its effectiveness in alleviating the burden on teachers of deploying and enacting such situations has been studied elsewhere, there are no studi...

This paper motivates and describes a workshop proposal for TEEM'14. The proposed workshop is aimed at participants interested in having a first contact with "learning design practices" for teaching planning. Such practices advocate the use of reflection, conceptualization and authoring scaffolds (that also include purpose-specific ICT tools) for ma...

This demonstration paper presents the Integrated Learning Design Environment (ILDE). ILDE is being developed in the METIS project, which aims at promoting the adoption of learning design by providing integrated support to teachers throughout the whole design and implementation process (or lifecycle). ILDE integrates existing free- and open-source t...

Despite the apparent maturity of the learning design field, and the variety of tooling available to support it, adoption among the teacher community (one of its alleged main targets) is still low. There is a lack of research on teachers’ perception and use of different technological learning design tools, as existing evaluations are often restricte...

From the conceptualization to the evaluation of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) scenarios, teachers address multiple tasks, sometimes being overwhelmed on account of the required time and associated burden. To support teachers in this endeavor, we propose to connect the pedagogical decisions made at design time with the analysis of...

As digital technologies permeate every aspect of our lives, the complexity of the educational settings, and of the technological support we use within them, unceasingly rises. This increased complexity, along with the need for educational practitioners to apply such technologies within multi-constraint authentic settings, has given rise to the noti...

As digital technologies permeate every aspect of our lives, the complexity of the educational settings, and of the technological support we use within them, unceasingly rises. This increased complexity, along with the need for educational practitioners to apply such technologies within multi-constraint authentic settings, has given rise to the noti...

There are several Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tool registries that support educators when searching ICT tools for their classrooms. A common problem in these registries is how their data is sustained, since educational descriptions of ICT tools are hard to create and maintain updated. This paper proposes SEEK-AT-WD, an infrastruc...

The orchestration of technology-enhanced learning situations (especially collaborative ones), that involve both Virtual Learning Environments and Web 2.0 tools (what some authors call Distributed Learning Environments, or DLEs) is often complex and burdensome, given the heterogeneous array of resources involved. In this paper we explore how GLUE!-P...

The use of immersive environments such as 3D virtual worlds (3DVWs) and augmented reality (AR) in education has been profusely explored during the last decades, showing significant evidence of its benefits for learning. However, the attempts to integrate immersive environments in everyday educational practice are hampered by the difficulties that t...

Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) researchers have been using the word 'orchestration' for a number of different reasons in the last years. From this variety of meanings in which it is employed, the notion of orchestration emerges as the appropriation and integration of the different available technologies in classroom practice. This paper introdu...

Transforming teachers' pedagogical ideas into ICT infrastructures ready for the enactment of such ideas is a complex process, especially in the case of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). In higher education, the current trend of using external tools (e.g., "Web 2.0") along with the institutional virtual learning environments (what so...

This paper presents the design and development of WeShare, a social annotation application that allows educators to search, create and enrich descriptions of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools from the Web of Data. As many others social applications, We-Share allows educators to publish information about the ICT tools they use i...

We propose the notion of "learning buckets": Configurable containers of positioned learning artifacts, that teachers may include in learning designs, and that are filled during the enactment by students or teachers.

Learning design research focuses on how educators can act as designers of technology-supported learning activities according to their specific educational needs and objectives. To foster and sustain the adoption of Learning design, the METIS project is working towards the implementation of an Integrated Learning Design Environment (ILDE). This pape...

Ubiquitous and mobile learning scenarios define activities happening within and beyond the walls of a classroom. However, the orchestration of authentic learning situations involving both physical and virtual spaces is still a significant challenge for teachers. Several proposals recently reported in the literature try to reduce teachers’ orchestra...

This paper presents Web Collage, an authoring tool developed to aid non-expert learning designers in the definition of assessments within Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) scripts. Web Collage fosters the consideration of assessments as a crucial aspect of CSCL scripts and tries to overcome the difficulties in their selection and con...

The alignment between competences, teaching-learning methodologies, and assessment is a key element of European higher education. This paper presents the efforts carried out by six telematics, computer science and electronic engineering education teachers toward achieving this alignment in their subjects. In a joint work with pedagogues, a set of r...

The increasing complexity of CSCL scenarios makes the classroom management highly demanding. Teachers invest considerable effort to design the learning scenario and to be aware of what happens during the enactment. We hypothesise that providing monitoring information closely related to the teachers' pedagogical intentions will help them to understa...

The integration of external tools in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) aims at enriching the learning activities that educational practitioners may design and enact. This paper presents GLUE!, an architecture that enables the lightweight integration of multiple existing external tools in multiple existing VLEs. GLUE! fosters this integration by...

Pervasive computing devices and communication infrastructures enable learning situations that occur in both the physical and the virtual world. However, deploying these pervasive situations is still a challenge for teachers. This paper presents GLUEPS-AR, a system for deploying learning designs across physical and web spaces, using mainstream Virtu...

This paper discusses the lightweight integration of external applications in different learning environments like LMSs, PLEs or MOOCs using the GLUE! architecture. Also, the current status of GLUE! is presented, describing the particularities of integrating external applications in Moodle, LAMS and MediaWiki. Finally, the paper gives instructions t...

Conceptual barriers are often cited as an important obstacle for the integration of innovative, ICT-enabled practice (such as CSCL) in authentic educational settings. Although professional development (PD) can be used to overcome these barriers, there is a dearth of descriptions of PD programs that foster change towards CSCL practice. This paper pr...

The benefits of using ePortfolios in widespread Distributed Learning Environments are hindered by two problems: students have difficulties in selecting which learning artifacts may demonstrate the acquisition of certain learning skills; and, both teachers and students have difficulties in collecting evidences produced by means of distributed and he...

A computer representation of teaching-learning processes in collaborative learning settings consists of modelling not only the sequence of learning activities and educational resources as existing learning design languages propose, but also modelling both the sequence of invocations of tools needed to carry out the learning activities and the flow...

This paper presents a Distributed Network Simulation Environment (DNSE) based on grid technology that, unlike the well‐known ns‐2 simulator, provides two important features that facilitate the study of network scenarios that require running multiple simulations. First, the DNSE is capable of automatically handling the realization of multiple distri...

The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools to support learning activities is nowadays generalized. Several educational registries provide information about ICT tools in order to help educators in their discovery and selection. These registries are typically isolated and require much effort to keep tool information up to date....