Julià Minguillón

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya | UOC · Computer, Multimedia and Telecommunication Studies

Learning to program is hard for many students. As a result, CS1 courses have a significant percentage of repeaters. For this reason, the goal of this article is to analyze which factors affect repeaters so that a specific learning strategy for them can be performed. In this regard, a first analysis of a CS1 course shows there are two types of repea...

Wikipedia is one of the most widely used information sources in the world. Although one of the guiding pillars of this digital platform is ensuring access to the diversity of human knowledge from a neutral point of view, there is a clear and persistent gender bias in terms of content about or contributed by women. The challenge is to include women...

Nowadays, most universities offer programmes and subjects online, specially in the case of fully online open/distance universities. Students have a higher degree of flexibility, which allows them to choose among an endless list of subjects for advancing within their degree. Although this can be seen as a positive result of enrollment flexibility po...

Wikipedia is one of the most widely used information sources in the world. Although one of the guiding pillars of this digital platform is ensuring access to the diversity of human knowledge from a neutral point of view, there is a clear and persistent gender bias in terms of content about or written by women. Through semi-structured interviews wit...

The global pandemic caused by the Covid-19 outbreak and the subsequent mandatory lockdown made university students spend more time at home, changing their daily habits including studying, as a consequence of the forced self-confinement. In this article we describe the changes observed in the connection patterns to the institutional learning managem...

Wikipedia's significant gender bias is widely acknowledged. In this paper we analyze the Spanish Wikipedia with the aim of estimating the percentage of women editors and measuring their engagement and editing practices with respect to their men counterparts. To identify the gender of Wikipedia registered users, we analyzed both the information cont...

El projecte ESPRIA (acrònim de l'expressió “EStudiants de PRImer Any”) és una intervenció institucional a gran escala de millora de l'acompanyament dels estudiants nouvinguts a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), que té com a objectiu incrementar la seva retenció als programes de grau, establint un conjunt de mesures orientades a facilitar-ne...

En este trabajo se presenta una intervención a escala institucional llevada a cabo con el objetivo de mejorar la experiencia de los estudiantes de primer año en la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, una institución online y abierta. El objetivo final es mejorar el rendimiento académico de los estudiantes y así incrementar su retención en los programa...

Wikipedia began in 2001 and already reaches more than 40 million articles in more than 300 languages. It is the main source of information for many users, especially in the educational field, where seven out of ten students recognize using Wikipedia. But even though Wikipedia promotes the ‘neutral point of view’ in its articles, it is well recogniz...

As an open university, at UOC there are nearly no enrolment requirements and, furthermore, students freely choose the courses they want to take each semester. But most of the students that choose UOC to combine their daily live with university studies are not really aware about the effort and workload implied. Therefore, there is a significant drop...

This research characterized how Facebook deals with rare diseases. This characterization included a content-based and temporal analysis, and its purpose was to help users interested in rare diseases to maximize the engagement of their posts and to help rare diseases organizations to align their priorities with the interests expressed in social netw...

One of online distance learning’s positive attributes is its flexibility. However, the possibility of engaging in periods of non-enrollment (breaks) usually ends in students dropping out. In this paper, the intention to continue of those students who have not enrolled in the second semester is analyzed, adopting a long-term program perspective. Thi...

This study concerned the active use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool in the classroom in higher education, trying to identify different usage profiles and their characterization. A questionnaire survey was administrated to all full-time and part-time teachers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, both in Barcelona,...

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...

Despite the huge amount of scientific and technological content available on the World Wide Web, most of it is closed behind paywalls, as with academic journals, or almost invisible, as with institutional repositories. Wikipedia can act as a chain-transfer agent, providing people with an accessible, organized structure containing both understandabl...

Purpose The aim of this study is to explore which personal and contextual factors affect the use of Wikipedia as a teaching resource in Higher Education institutions. Design/methodology/approach This research question is approached by investigating faculty perceptions and attitudes in two large Spanish universities. For this purpose, a comprehen...

'iAm' is an online short- lm editing engine that generates pseu- do-in nite instances of a same story. This artistic artefact can be considered a working prototype that serves as a proof of a concept. Its artistic aim is to point out the relationship between humans and machines by letting the software make decisions during the editing process. The...

A key impact the Internet is having on university teaching involves the new choices being provided because of open educational content. Wikipedia is a clear example of these new options. It is a gigantic open repository of knowledge, and it can also be considered a platform that facilitates collaboration in knowledge creation and dissemination. Our...

The iAm artistic online project is a generative editing software capable of rendering 25'' short-films every-time a viewer clicks the play button in the website http://iam.caotic.net This poster explains the main 3 parts of iAm artwork: How the shooting have been done, how does the software works and how have the interface and data visualization b...

Distance and online universities have usually more flexible academic requirements than brick-and-mortar ones, so students do not uniformly advance within the programme they enroll into as they are supposed to. Furthermore, due to their intrinsic nature, distance students need additional support for deciding which subjects they will take every semes...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate university faculty perceptions and practices of using Wikipedia as a teaching resource. Design/methodology/approach – This study is based on a large survey to all faculty members in two large public universities. A total of 913 valid responses were collected through an online questionnaire with...

In recent years, several studies have been carried out into the reasons why students drop out of online higher education, following the rise in the relative weight of this form of education. However, more effort has gone into analyzing the causes of this phenomenon than into trying to characterize students who drop out, that is defining what a drop...

This article presents a case study of the IR at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC). The study involved in-depth interviews [9] with 8 teachers and 7 students to find out about their perceptions and motivations with respect to the usefulness of incorporating a series of 2.0 features with the aim of improving the...

Some faculty members from different universities around the world have begun to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool in recent years. These experiences show, in most cases, very satisfactory results and a substantial improvement in various basic skills, as well as a positive influence on the students' motivation. Nevertheless and despite the growing i...

Despite the initial sceptical attitude of university faculty towards Wikipedia as a source of reliable information – mainly because of its unclear authorship – an increasing number of teaching experiences using Wikipedia have begun to appear at different universities around the world. These experiences show, in most cases, very satisfactory results...

Personal information behavior has been studied within a large number of different contexts; however, individuals show different information-related competencies in their professional, academic or daily life contexts. Literature suggests that if a person is information-related competent in one context, then he or she will be competent in the rest of...

In this paper we describe a proposal for defining the relationships between resources, users and services in a digital repository. Nowadays, virtual learning environments are widely used but digital repositories are not fully integrated yet into the learning process. Our final goal is to provide final users with recommendation systems and reputatio...

Entre los años 2005 y 2007, una comunidad de interés alrededor de los recursos educativos en abierto (OER, según sus iniciales en inglés) impulsada porla UNESCOparticipó en un estudio para averiguar cuáles eran las principales cuestiones clave para promover e impulsar el movimiento de los recursos educativos en abierto y hacerlos salir de los peque...

Éste es el trabajo llevado a cabo por el segundo de los grupos participantes del taller VisDa, donde se explican los pasos que se deben seguir para crear un plugin para Mosaic que permita acceder de manera visual a todos los contenidos de los diez años de la revista.

The aim of this article is to analyse the diff erent processes involved in the preservation of learning objects in a digital repository. Presented as a case study is a prototype repository for a collection of statistics-related e-learning materials used in the respective academic subjects off ered by the Open University of Catalonia (UOC, Universit...

The concept of content in an educational context is very different from the one in other fields such as publishing or electronic newspapers, for example. From textbooks to exercises, from software simulations to data sets containing educational data, it is necessary to rethink the way these educational resources or “learning objects” are managed. O...

The World Wide Web, the world’s largest resource for information, has evolved from organizing information using controlled, top-down taxonomies to a bottom up approach that emphasizes assigning meaning to data via mechanisms such as the Social Web (Web 2.0). Tagging adds meta-data, (weak semantics) to the content available on the web. This researc...

In recent years, studies into the reasons for dropping out of online higher education have been undertaken with greater regularity, parallel to the rise in the relative weight of this type of education, compared with brick-and-mortar education. However, the work invested in characterising the students who drop out of education, compared with those...

The aim of this paper is to discuss how computer-supported statistics courses can be enhanced by incorporating learning object repositories. These e-repositories can act as a perfect methodological complement to other technologies such as learning management systems, statistical software or other general internet resources. To that end, the chapter...

Learning object repositories are a basic piece of virtual learning environments used for content management. Nevertheless, learning objects have special characteristics that make traditional solutions for content management ineffective. In particular, browsing and searching for learning objects cannot be based on the typical authoritative metadata...

Learning objects have been the promise of providing people with high quality learning resources. Initiatives such as MIT OpenCourseWare, MERLOT and others have shown the real possibilities of creating and sharing knowledge through Internet. Thousands of educational resources are available through learning object repositories. We indeed live in an a...

According to the Bologna process, learners should to be able to acquire and develop their competences in a real scenario. This means that the learning process has to evolve from contents to activities for promoting skills and abilities, considering learner profile and background. In order to provide learners with a personalized learning path, we ha...

Web 2.0 services such as social bookmarking allow users to manage and share the links they find interesting, adding their own tags for describing them. This is especially interesting in the field of open educational resources, as delicious is a simple way to bridge the institutional point of view (i.e. learning object repositories) with the individ...

The European Higher Education Area is an important paradigm shift, as is the adoption of a learning process based on the acquisition and development of skills through activities, relegating to the background content. The concept of activity includes and combines many different elements that involve all kinds of teaching resources, covering a wider...

Peer-reviewed

The possibilities and expansion of the use of Web 2.0 has opened up a world of possibilities in online learning. In spite of the integration of these tools in education major changes are required in the educational design of instructional processes. This paper presents an educational experience conducted by the Open University of Catalonia using th...

Most educational institutions include nowadays a digital repository as part of their development and positioning strategy. The main goals of a digital repository are preservation and dissemination, which are some how contradictory, especially if the repository follows an open approach, as it is designed, built and managed from an institutional pers...

This work outlines the design process of a user centered learning object repository. A repository should foster the development and acquisition of both generic and specific informational competencies. The results of the first stage of the user centered design process are presented which provide a clear understanding of user and task requirements an...

In this paper we identify the requirements for creating formal descriptions of learning scenarios designed under the European Higher Education Area paradigm, using competences and learning activities as the basic pieces of the learning process, instead of contents and learning resources, pursuing personalization. Classical arrangements of content b...

Virtual learning environments are online spaces where learners interact with other learners, teachers, resources and the environment in itself. Although technology is meant to enhance the learning process, there are important issues regarding pedagogical and organizational aspects that must be addressed. In this paper we review the barriers detecte...

In this paper we describe a research project which aims to in-troduce the use of a semantic repository of learning resources for teaching Mathematics and Statistics in a Computer Sci-ence degree. The semantic repository is fully integrated in the virtual classroom of a completely online virtual univer-sity. Students browse and search the repository...

The internet is now a constant in all parts of life and at all levels: personal, academic and professional. In only a few years, the internet has changed the way we relate, study, work, shop, spend our free time, etc. The web, the collection of resources accessible over the internet, has become a gargantuan oracle where people search, create and sh...

This article shows the evolution that distance education has undergone recently from a new perspective, Web Science, which studies how the Web has evolved not only technologically but also socially and organisationally. A technological solution initially designed to share information, the Web is now present in all everyday activities and in every s...

Recent studies have demonstrated that specific instruction about metacognitive strategies improves achievement, the accuracy of knowledge monitoring, and the application of learning strategies in hypermedia environments. However, there are no models ...

This paper describes a hybrid methodology to study users in ongoing relationships based on three levels of user data analysis. Most user-centered design methods are ideal for the analysis of users' needs, wants, and expectations at a specific point in time. However, nowadays, most online applications and services have recurrent users whose characte...

Open educational resources have been the subject of intense debate at an institutional level for a relatively short time, coinciding with the diffusion of diverse international experiences in this matter. This monograph presents various projects and proposals that address the issue from different approaches that are commonly employed within this am...

Purpose The purpose of this research is to propose an evaluation framework for analyzing learning objects usage, with the aim of extracting useful information for improving the quality of the metadata used to describe the learning objects, but also for personalization purposes, including user models and adaptive itineraries. Design/methodology/app...

En este trabajo se presenta un conjunto de reflexiones y conclusiones alrededor del proceso de formación del profesorado y personal no docente en el uso de un LMS (Learning Management System) en un centro educativo, y el proceso de implantación de dicho sistema. En el entorno presencial de aprendizaje del Centre d'Estudis Politècnics, en adelante C...

The Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) road mapping work was conducted to provide decision makers with an overview of current and likely future developments in Open Educational Resources (OER) and recommendations on how various challenges in OER could be addressed. The report covers the following areas: * Policies, institutional f...

The Open University of Catalonia is a virtual university that offers some courses in the same virtual context to official degree students, as well as for students or professionals who want to improve their knowledge in a special area. The scenario where the lifelong learning courses are carried out is called Ateneu. A good example of this framework...

In this paper a novel semifragile watermarking scheme for images with multiple bands is presented. We propose to use the remote sensing image as a whole, using a vector quantization approach, instead of processing each band separately. This scheme uses the signature of the multispectral or hyperspectral image to embed the mark in it and detects a m...

This paper presents a benchmark assessment of the WAUC digital audio watermarking scheme, which relies on MPEG 1 Layer 3 compression to determine where and how the embedded mark must be introduced. The mark is embedded by modifying the magnitude of the spectrum at several frequencies which are chosen according to the difference between the original...

In this paper we describe a proposal for multimedia and e-learning content description based on standards in-teroperability within a digital library environment integrated in a virtual campus. In any virtual e-learning environment, a complex scenario which usually includes a digital library or, at least, a repository of learning resources, dierent...

Some of the professions that are evolving at a faster pace are those who are linked to the use of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In the field of data engineering, and in the data mining field in particular, an interdisciplinary working team is needed because, depending on the application context, professionals from different...

While implementing Lifelong Learning strategies in Higher and Further Education, usually acknowledgement of prior knowledge of students and recognition of individual learning paths are regarded as the most important challenges. Although ICT enhanced learning slowly gains ground, the supportive role of open educational resources, in particular digit...

In the book Making It Personal: How to Profit from Personalization without Invading Privacy, author Bruce Kasanoff reflects on the way in which public and private institutions gather and store information about users, and how they use it to offer new and better services adapted to the needs of each case. The book has become prophetic and many of th...

While implementing Lifelong Learning strategies in Higher and Further Education, usually acknowledgement of prior knowledge of students and recognition of individual learning paths are regarded as the most important challenges. Although ICT enhanced learning slowly gains ground, the supportive role of open educational resources, in particular digit...

This paper discusses the modification of a robust digital audio watermarking scheme to allow the disclosure of the embedding and detection algorithms. The chosen scheme uses MPEG 1 Layer 3 compression to determine the position of the mark bits in the frequency domain. The marking positions would be exposed if the original embedding algorithm was di...

In this paper, we describe the navigational behavior of the students of an e-learning virtual environment, in order to determine whether such navigational patterns are related to the academic performance achieved by the students or not, and which behaviors can be identified as more successful. As an example, a subset of students taking a degree in...

This paper describes a study regarding the influence of a watermarking scheme based on near-lossless JPEG2000 compression in the performance of lossless or near-lossless image compression methods. Due to the nature of ultraspectral imaging applications, the imperceptibility property becomes more important than capacity or robustness, which determin...

This paper provides a study concerning the suitability of well-known image coding techniques originally devised for lossy compression of still natural images when applied to lossless compression of ultraspectral sounder data. An ultraspectral sounder generates an unprecedented amount of 3D data, consisting of two spatial and one spectral dimensions...

We perform an empirical evaluation of the lossy compression properties of the JPEG2000 standard for watermarking and fingerprinting purposes. The JPEG2000 standard is used as a basic tool for determining both how and where the embedded watermark should be placed in the image. The original image is slightly modified to generate a similar image (but...

Purpose To describe a browsing and searching personalization system for digital libraries based on the use of ontologies for describing the relationships between all the elements which take part in a digital library scenario of use. Design/methodology/approach Identification of all the desired functionalities and requirements that are necessary to...

En este art´ıculo se describe el dise¿no de una plataforma de e-learning que integra el uso de learning objects (objetos de aprendizaje) reutilizables como elementos b´asicos para la construcci´on de itinerarios que permiten la personalizaci´on del proceso de aprendizaje en funci´on de las caracter´ısticas especiales de cada curso y de cada perfil...