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Publications
Publications (148)
Many researchers and institutions in the field of education are striving to align the different levels of the education system to the growing needs and requirements of society. A meaningful part of these attempts has been concentrated on a systematic introduction of the competence-based education approach. Some countries adopted it and reshaped the...
Given a text, can we segment it into semantically coherent sections in an automatic way? Can we detect the semantic boundaries, if we know how many they are? Can we determine how many semantically distinct sections are in the text? These are the questions we address in this paper. To respond, we use the Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Tra...
We present an innovative system which couples the ability of producing recordings of lectures, meetings and other events when something is presented via screen projection, with the possibility of taking screenshots of what is being projected at any give time. This opens new possibilities for more efficient note taking, which is a practice known to...
Student projects are core activities for a project-based learning approach. However, introducing projects in classes does not automatically imply the adoption of such a method. In this paper we propose a scheme as a tool to analyse if and how much student projects are introduced and realised according to a project-based learning method. As part of...
We discuss the problem of note taking versus having handouts provided by the teacher. We present a system we developed, composed by both hardware and software solution. The system requests students to be active in class taking notes, and yet helps them by relieving from the need of transcribing what is being presented. Moreover, it synchronizes the...
We present our work about the development of a system, which allows taking notes during a lecture, and having the notes integrated in the video recording of the lecture itself. The notes become semantic markers into the video, and could possibly be shared with peers and teacher.
The competence-based approach to education has been found
to be effective for teaching. Introduced in Italian secondary schools in
2010 by the Ministry for Education, it has hardly had a real adoption.
The paper illustrates a study whose goal is to find elective ways to
support the adoption of the competence-based approach in the Italian
secondary...
Refinding information is a frequent yet difficult task on the Web. Various Web tools have demonstrated that context plays an important role in memorizing cues for retrieval. However, it is not yet sufficiently explored, which type of context is useful for which situations. We carried out a three-stage study to observe how users approach context in...
One of the greatest challenges of Web 2.0 is to find the most relevant information to users’ needs with minimum effort and time. Though search en-gines have improved greatly in the recent years, search results heavily depend on the textual search query, which does not fully reflect users’ search context. In particular, teachers find it difficult to...
Peer-assessment in education has a long history. Although the adoption of technological tools is not a recent phenomenon, many peer-assessment studies are conducted in manual environments. Automating peer-assessment tasks improves the efficiency of the practice and provides opportunities for taking advantage of large amounts of student-generated da...
Introducing competence-based education in a school, which has traditionally been based on the knowledge transmission paradigm, is a difficult task. National governments play an important role in pushing and facilitating such transition, and they are requested to do so by the European Parliament recommendation about the provision of ‘key competences...
Predicting overall student performance and monitoring progress have attracted more attention in the past five years than before. Demographic data, high school grades and test result constitute much of the data used for building prediction models. This study demonstrates how data from a peer-assessment environment can be used to build student progre...
Wikipedia contains a wealth of data, some of which somes in a structured form. There have been initiatives to extract such structured knowledge, incorporating it in RDF triples. This allows running queries against the body of knowledge. Unfortunately, writing such queries is an unfeasible task for non-technical people, and even those who are famili...
The ubiquitous nature of the Web has rendered a vast amount of information accessible on demand transforming itself to be the primary hub of personal and collective knowledge. Consequently it is becoming more challenging to manage such information effectively as we face the era of information overload, a.k.a. infobesity. The most popular way of man...
A common approach to the problem of predicting students’ exam scores has been to base this prediction on the previous educational history of students. In this paper, we present a model that bases this prediction on students’ performance on several tasks assigned throughout the duration of the course. In order to build our prediction model, we use d...
To enable a more effective process of learning and teaching, the ped- agogic research and many educational institutions suggest an approach by com- petence. This approach is not yet widespread in the classes of Computer Sci- ence. This paper describes a study on Computer Science competences in Italian secondary schools. The study is the first step...
We present the eSchooling project, which aims at supporting the introduction of a nce-based approach to education in schools, leveraging Information Communication Technology. The project supports the whole teaching learning lifecycle, from the didactic project to the assessment, to the metacognitive reflection on the learning process. It supports a...
The emergence of mobile devices brings high potential of business value. These devices include sensors, actuators, smartphones, tablets, and other complex devices. They have various computational resources, and are usually connected by wireless connections. On top of the available resources and provided services, complex tasks can be performed. Res...
This paper discusses the role of interaction and user experience in the design of an interface of search for digital libraries. We present our preliminary work in the design of an advanced interaction interface for “Publicamente”, a web based semantic multimedia digital library that allows the archiving, management and access to a collection of het...
Mobile devices are emerging as working equipment. Developing and maintaining mobile applications for evolving business is costly. Business Process Management technologies enable loose-coupling and composition of services to support the evolving business logic. Business Process Management becomes pervasive and more powerful when it interweaves mobil...
Connected to cloud, mobile devices enable workers to manage the business processes hosted on remote process engines. However, traditional business process execution is not tailored for mobile devices. Typically the business logic remains in the cloud, making the process execution on mobile devices vulnerable to unreliable network connection. In thi...
L'Informatica è una disciplina che viene insegnata ormai da anni e a diversi livelli; con la diffusione di applicazioni di uso comune, la platea di coloro che si avvicinano all'apprendimento della materia si articola in diverse categorie. Qui si esamina il caso di chi studia informatica, anche se non è specialista di informatica, né intende diventa...
Wireless enabled electronic devices are becoming cheaper, more powerful and thus more popular. They include sensors, actuators, smartphones, tablets, and other complex devices. They can carry out complex tasks, cooperating with their "neighbors". However, it is difficult to develop mobile applications to exploit the full power of available resource...
In this article, we provide an overview of the emerging research area on Analytics and Video-Based Learning. Although there are many and diverse ways of designing learning videos, there is limited understanding of the efficacy and usefulness of each method. Therefore, we survey the state-of-the-art in the design, development and evaluation of open...
One of the challenges of both traditional and contemporary instructional media in
higher education is creating a sustainable teaching-learning environment that ensures continuous
engagement of students and provides efficient means of assessing their performance. We present a
peer-based framework designed to increase active participation of students...
The International Workshop on Analytics on Video-based Learning (WAVe2013) aims to connect research efforts on Video-based Learning with Learning Analytics to create visionary ideas and foster synergies between the two fields. The main objective of WAVe is to build a research community around the topical area of Analytics on video-based learning. I...
The on-going project MDO ("Manuale dell' Opera", Manual of the building's operations) aims to enhance interoperability across stakeholders in the management of buildings. Typically a building construction and maintenance is supported by several non-interoperating software applications, acting on non-integrated data. The aim of the project is to sup...
This paper describes the potential and promising value of analytics on the emerging area of video-based learning. In particular, we describe the contributions presented at the International Workshop on Analytics on Video-based Learning (WAVe 2013) and envision the future of this research area. WAVe presents the current state-of-the-art in the desig...
Videolectures over the Internet started at the turn of the century and became more and more popular, until they recently obtained a wide echo in the form of Massive Open On-Line Courses (MOOCs). Although videolecture usage data have always been important, in the case of MOOCs they are vital for the success of the initiative. In the present paper, w...
We briefly review the state of mobile learning, and suggest that a successful use of the technology needs to pass through a rethinking of the learning and teaching process. We provide a successful example of such paradigm change.
We present a free and open source software for capturing and distributing video-lectures. At the conference the software is also being demonstrated.
In this paper, the author proposes a paradigm shift in the way video lectures are used in education. Instead of using them to support traditional teaching methods, the author suggests replacing standard lectures with video lectures, opening a space for a more participatory and interactive form of teaching that supports students in deeper understand...
We present an app that allows bringing video-lectures on Android devices in either a basic or a rich format. The paper also discusses in general terms the suitability of the video-lecture paradigm in a mobile setting.
We recorded and published on iTunes U videos of a Calculus course. We then investigated the students' perception of the usability and utility of the videos. Our results show that the video resources are indeed considered useful by the students, and that they are in fact a useful learning resource that improves academic results.
We run a project involving a large number of schools introducing an inexpensive, Wiimote based Interactive Whiteboard. Our aim was to verify how far such solution was from the industrial solutions. We found that in spite of some minor nuisances, the devices are actually well usable. An advantage is that since the solution is cheap, it can be used a...
In a world characterized by rapid change driven by globalization, an ICT-based economy transformation poses some challenges and opportunities for the private sector and the government sector alike. ICT has for some time been at the core of government tasks, inseparable from strategy, planning, consultation and implementation to improve citizen's li...
Recent trends suggest that multimedia (in particular audio and video) will increase their share of Internet traffic, and that users are becoming more and more acquainted with viewing multimedia content on their computers and mobile devices. Scholarly institutions are experimenting since several years with the distribution of video-lectures, which a...
The field of e-learning has been a precursor in using the video streaming over the Internet. Both the synchronous and the asynchronous options have been explored over the last decade, with the asynchronous one becoming the dominant paradigm in recent years. Pedagogical research lecture reported evidence that video-streaming is an effective way of t...
Having worked for a long time with video-lectures, we devised a new teaching model that makes use of the recorded videos to free the teacher from part of his work and allowing him to concentrate his efforts on a more effective and involving teaching strategy.
We describe the VOLARE (“Video On Line As Replacement of old tEaching practices”) methodology, whose aim is to help traditional
teachers to switch from the frontal lecture model to a pedogically more sound and effective strategy. The key of the methodology
relies in taking advantage of today’s innovative technology to relief the teacher from the du...
This paper describes a domain independent approach for semantically annotating and representing multimedia presentations. It uses a combination of techniques to automatically discover the content of the media and, though supervised or unsupervised methods, it can generate a RDF description out of it. The domain independence is achieved using Wikipe...
In this paper we present an algorithm that, using Wikipedia as a reference, extracts semantic information from an arbitrary text. Our algorithm refines a procedure proposed by others, which mines all the text contained in the whole Wikipedia. Our refinement, based on a clustering approach, exploits the semantic information contained in certain type...
Student mobility is a priority in the European Union since it not only allows academic interchange but also fosters the awareness of being a European citizen amongst students. The Bologna Process aimed at homogenizing the structure of the European Universities to facilitate the recognition of academic titles as foreseen by the Lisbon Recognition Co...
Student mobility is a priority in the European Union since it not only allows academic interchange but also fosters the awareness of being a European citizen amongst students. The Bologna Process aimed at homogenizing the structure of the European Universities to facilitate the recognition of academic titles as foreseen by the Lisbon Recognition Co...
In e-learning environments, very often a large number of multimedia learning materials are provided and used in combination. Accessing a repository of unstructured multimedia material for learning purposes is still an open problem. In this paper we present the evaluation process and results of a two evaluation session run in a two year period for a...
In this paper we describe a method to automatically discover important concepts and their relationships in e-Lecture material.
The discovered knowledge is used to display semantic aware categorizations and query suggestions for facilitating navigation
inside an unstructured multimedia repository of e-Lectures. We report about an implemented approac...
The paper aims to describe in some details a system called Mobile Eldit (m-Eldit) that is under development at the University of Trento, Italy. It is a mobile version that can be accessed from mobile devices like PDAs, of an existing language learning platform, developed at the European Academy of Bolzano, Italy. The paper also gives description of...
Semantic-based information retrieval is an area of ongoing work. In this paper we present a solution for giving semantic support
to multimedia content information retrieval in an e-Learning environment where very often a large number of multimedia objects
and information sources are used in combination. Semantic support is given through intelligent...
In this paper we propose an annotation-driven approach in support to multimedia retrieval and argue that under a number of different scenarios, this is very effective for semantically meaningful search. Our method is applied at the e-Learning context where very often a large number of multimedia objects and information sources are used in combinati...
We report the findings of a project aimed at introducing Interactive Whiteboards in schools (both primary and secondary). We focussed on the early phases (installation, introduction, training, first use). We find that there are indeed problems that need to be tackled before one can hope to obtain the good results that are promised by the marketing...
Early estimation of the size of a software product is extremely important. In this paper we analyze two software packages developed by a CMM level 3 software firm. We study if any property of analysis objects can be used to infer the size of the final code in an object-oriented environment. In both cases we find the number of methods well correlate...
M-learning is a rapidly expanding domain recently. Provoked by the fast advances of mobile technologies, different applications and systems are developed continuously. Here we address the hoarding problem, which is weakly explored before but is a particularly important issue in the mobile domain, and a solution should be included in every system wi...
Proper reuse of learning objects depends both on the amount and quality of attached semantic metadata such as "learning objective'", "related concept", etc. Manually expressing such metadata is a time consuming and expensive task. Here we present an approach based on a probabilistic model, which through the automatic classification of learning reso...
The new e-learning trend, called mobile learning opens variety of questions to solve. To allow access to learning content anytime and anyplace a technique called hoarding is sometimes indispensable for covering the periods of disconnection. In this paper we show the outcomes of the hoarding sub-system of Mobile ELDIT system, developed at the Univer...
With the advances in mobile technologies is now possible to support learners and teachers activities on the move. We analyzed the functionalities that should be provided by a general mobile learning platform and identified a problem that is weakly studied, namely support for offline usage of learning material, called hoarding. Hoarding can use some...
In the recent years the importance of utilizing new technologies in education is permanently growing. The field of mobile learning is exploring the use of small mobile devices for teaching and studying. In this paper we present an ongoing research on mobile language learning, carried at the University of Trento, Italy. Our system is called Mobile E...
In the context of e-learning and especially in adaptive learning systems an integral part of any system is the user analysis and behavior observation. We look at this important part from another angle - the one of mobile learning and more specifically the automatic delivery of learning material during users' offline periods. This process, called ho...
The importance of the utilization of modern technologies in education is continuously growing. One of the recently widely discussed fields is the one of mobile learning (or m-learning) where different mobile devices are used for educational purposes. This paper describes a system called Mobile ELDIT (m-ELDIT) that is under development at the Univer...
Synchronous collaborative navigation is a form of social navigation where users virtually share a web browser. In this paper, we present a symmetric, proxy-based architecture where each user can take the lead and guide others in visiting web sites, without the need for a special browser or other software. We show how we have applied this scheme to...
This paper presents `Mobile ELDIT' (m-ELDIT), a system under development which goal is to offer access from PDAs to the learning materials of ELDIT -- an adaptable language learning platform. The ELDIT system, which is developed at the European Academy of Bolzano, consists of a learner's dictionary and a text corpus. Exercises, a tandem system and...
Early estimation of the size of a software product is extremely important. In this paper we analyze two software packages developed by a CMM level 3 software firm. We study if any property of analysis objects can be used to infer the size of the final code in an object-oriented environment. In both cases we find the number of methods well correlate...
Over the past decades we have seen the exponential growth of learning resources on the web, with thousands of documents easily available. As the availability of learning resources increases, the difficulty to find required and relevant learning resources becomes more and more apparent. We believe that hierarchical organization of web learning resou...
Synchronous collaborative navigation is a form of social navigation where users virtually share a web browser. In this paper, we present a symmetric, proxy-based architecture where each user can take the lead and guide others in visiting web sites, without the need for a special browser or other software. We show how we have applied this scheme to...
Due to massive information overload on the web it's hard to index and reuse existing learning resources. Classifying learning resources according to domain specific concept hierarchies could address the problem of indexing and reusabil- ity. Manual classification is a tedious task and, as a result, automatic classifiers are in high demand. For this...
With the advances in mobile technologies it is already possible to support learners and teachers activities on the move. Nevertheless the interoperation between a Learning Information Systems and mobile technology is still weakly explored. We analyzed the functionalities that should be provided by e-learning and m-learning and present them in a gen...
Abstract: Over the past decades we have seen the exponential growth of learning resources on the web, with thousands of documents easily available. As the availability of learning resources increases, the difficulty to find required and relevant learning resources becomes more and more apparent. We believe that hierarchical organization of web lear...
This paper presents ‘Mobile ELDIT’ (m-ELDIT), a system under development which goal is to offer access from PDAs to the learning materials of ELDIT – an adaptable language learning platform. The ELDIT system, which is developed at the European Academy of Bolzano, consists of a learner’s dictionary and a text corpus. Exercises, a tandem system and a...
Today's learning management systems offer little or no support to knowledge management. As a consequence, students do not get a comprehensive, overall view of what might be useful for their individual needs, and the e-learning potential is not fully exploited. We propose an architecture for overcoming the problem and making e-learning more effectiv...
A rather new tendency in distance learning is the usage of mobile and wireless technologies to support learners and educators. In this paper we present an architecture, where the functionalities of e-learning platform are presented as Web services and on top of it a mobile learning management system is taking the responsibilities of adapting those...
Based upon experience in teaching Computer Science course in university traditional curricula, we have explored at our University the creation of new educational curricula that combines apprenticeship (i.e. an educational curriculum combining working and studying) with university studies. The project relies on the intelligent use of innovative trai...
The paper presents the guidelines of a project of three Italian Univer- sities (Bologna, Siena, Trento) which aim is to investigate the use of mobile computing technologies to support the learning processes in a University con- text. The project covers three main areas. The first area is concerned with find- ing effective models for mobile learning...
course": an interconnected set of resources aiming at presenting material related to a particular topic. Course authors do provide external links to related material. Such external links are however "frozen" at the time of publication of the course.
Using metadata is very important for achieving best results in finding and reusing e-learning material. Metadata are however effective only if there is a common agreement on the terminology used. Defining an ontology is a way out, but creating a good ontology and reaching a consensus on it is a non trivial task. In this paper, we claim that an onto...
The rapid expansion of the Internet has finally brought a wider availability of large bandwidth connections reaching the homes. This means that the content that can be delivered through the Internet is dramatically changing. We run the experiment of web-casting, on-demand delivering and producing CD's of a whole university course. We based our expe...
We study a context -dependent problem that arises in an m-learning environment: how to print a document when being in a generic place. We implement a working solution, and argue about the general value of our approach. We examine the printing problem because it has a practical value, and at the same time it turns out to be a prototype for a class o...
M-learning is a quite new, exciting and promising field. Papers on this domain are spread through several conference and workshops proceedings, so it is rather difficult to have a complete view of the field. This paper aims at helping, by reviewing the existing work, and classifying the research directions that try to answer the questions of how m-...
The paper presents the guidelines of a project of three italian Universities (Bologna, Siena, Trento) which aim is to integrate a multi-agent recommendation system that suggests educational resources to students into a mobile learning platform that supports mobile learning processes in a University context. The project covers three main areas. The...
The typical teaching approach, at least when classes are large, is still the classical lecture. By using the new high-speed Internet lines reaching the homes, it possible is to limit some of the drawbacks of this approach. We run an experiment by diffusing via Internet a whole university course. The course was web-cast (synchronously) and delivered...
E-learning systems are often based on the notion of "course": an interconnected set of resources aiming at presenting material related to a particular topic. Course authors do provide external links to related material. Such external links are however "frozen" at the time of publication of the course. Metadata are useful for classifying and finding...
We present an HTTP-based discussion tool that allows in-context asynchronous interaction. Our prototypal system can be integrated in any HTTP-based e-learning platform. It allows to annotate web pages, and to share the notes with the teacher, with (a selected group) of other students, or to keep them as personal notes.
The annotation of web pages, and the possibility to share the notes with others, seems to be a powerful tool. Although several tools already provide such possibility, they are not as widely popular as one would expect them to be. We try to explain this fact, and propose a novel architectural approach that is, in our view, particularly suited to som...
The field of e-learning has been a precursor in using the video streaming over the Internet. Both the synchronous and the asynchronous options have been explored over the last decade, with the asynchronous one becoming the dominant paradigm in recent years. Pedagogical research lecture reported evidence that video-streaming is an effective way of t...
In our paper we discuss a system which takes advantage of the possibilities of object oriented software design and implementation on the one hand and it assists the users in using the same pieces of software several times on the other hand. This is the so called software reuse, which is applied not only to the code and executable parts of software,...