Pedro J. Muñoz Merino

University Carlos III de Madrid | UC3M · Department of Telematic Engineering

The prediction and explainability of student dropout in degree programs is an important issue, as it impacts students, families, and institutions. Nevertheless, the main efforts in this regard have focused on predictive power, even though explainability is more relevant to decision-makers. The objectives of this work were to propose a novel explain...

Educational content has become a key element for improving the quality and effectiveness of teaching. Many studies have been conducted on user and knowledge modeling using machine-learning algorithms in smart-learning environments. However, few studies have focused on content modeling to estimate content indicators based on student interaction. Thi...

In higher education, Learning Management Systems (LMS) are widely used to enable a space where instructors can deliver the materials, propose and collect activities, and interact with students, among other functionalities. These LMSs allow collecting a vast amount of information whose analysis may improve the learning process and can even detect ch...

Smart Learning environments (SLEs) are defined [1] as learning ecologies where students engage in learning activities, or where teachers facilitate such activities with the support of tools and technology. SLEs can encompass physical or virtual spaces in which a system senses the learning context and process by collecting data, analyzes the data, a...

Background Learning Analytics (LA) is an emerging field concerned with measuring, collecting, and analysing data about learners and their contexts to gain insights into learning processes. As the technology of Learning Analytics is evolving, many systems are being implemented. In this context, it is essential to understand stakeholders' expectation...

Learning analytics is a key knowledge area for the improvement of education that proposes the use of educational data to improve decision making. In the last years, the Iberoamerican region has made a lot of efforts to introduce learning analytics and take advantage of its advantages. In this Special Issue, a set of proposals of learning analytics...

Learning analytics (LA) employs educational data to improve the timeliness of support for learners. Apart from technical aspects, there is a need to understand social complexities brought about by different stakeholders, so as to systematise the adoption of LA in Higher Education (HE). We present an analysis of the situation, needs and challenges o...

Worldwide, one of the main concerns of universities is to reduce the dropout rate. Several initiatives have been taken to avoid this problem; however, it is essential to recognize at-risk students as early as possible. This article is an extension of a previous study that proposed a predictive model to identify students at risk of dropout from the...

Abstract: This article describes three studies that looked into the impact of learning technologies on wellbeing, as well as the role that Learning Analytics can play in measuring and enhancing such an impact. To begin, ten Spanish researchers used the IEEE P7010 wellbeing metrics to analyse their products' wellbeing impact. They also responded to...

Background Surgeons need to train and certify their technical skills. This is usually done with the intervention of experts who monitor and assess trainees. Nevertheless, this is a time-consuming task that is subject to variations among evaluators. In recent decades, subjectivity has been significantly reduced through 1) the introduction of standar...

Many studies have been conducted on modeling learners in education using probabilistic methods to infer different indicators. However, little research has been done on modeling content in education by estimating different content characteristics using probabilistic methods. Based on the existing gap in this area, this paper presents a model for exe...

Discussion forums are a valuable source of information in educational platforms such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), as users can exchange opinions or even help other students in an asynchronous way, contributing to the sustainability of MOOCs even with low interaction from the instructor. Therefore, the use of the forum messages to get ins...

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

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) pose a challenge for instructors when trying to provide personalised support to learners, due to large numbers of registered participants. Conversational agents can be of help to support learners when working with MOOCs. This article presents an adaptive learning module for JavaPAL, a conversational agent that co...

The assessment of surgical technical skills to be acquired by novice surgeons has been traditionally done by an expert surgeon and is therefore of a subjective nature. Nevertheless, the recent advances on IoT (Internet of Things), the possibility of incorporating sensors into objects and environments in order to collect large amounts of data, and t...

One important problem in MOOCs is the lack of personalized support from teachers. Conversational agents arise as one possible solution to assist MOOC learners and help them to study. For example, conversational agents can help review key concepts of the MOOC by asking questions to the learners and providing examples. JavaPAL, a voice-based conversa...

MOOCs (massive open online courses) have a built-in forum where learners can share experiences as well as ask questions and get answers. Nevertheless, the work of the learners in the MOOC forum is usually not taken into account when calculating their grade in the course, due to the difficulty of automating the calculation of that grade in a context...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the expectations of academic staff to learning analytics services from an ideal as well as a realistic perspective. This mixed-method study focused on a cross-case analysis of staff from Higher Education Institutions from four European universities (Spain, Estonia, Netherlands, UK). While there are some diffe...

Learning analytics (LA) can provide useful information for addressing the educational needs in Latin American universities, such as reducing program quality disparities and student dropout rates. Some researchers have suggested to build capacity in this region for institutional adoption of LA tools. Yet, there is still a long way to move from exper...

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) usually make adaptation decisions based on user models that rely on students’ knowledge. However, there are other interesting indicators, which could be used for adaptation that need further exploration. Students’ efficiency (defined as whether they require a lot of time to achieve correctness in their exercises)...

Learning analytics (LA) as a research field has grown rapidly over the last decade. However, adoption of LA is mostly found to be small in scale and isolated at the instructor level. This paper presents an exploratory study on institutional approaches to LA in European higher education and discusses prominent challenges that impede LA from reaching...

As in other research fields, the development of learning analytics is influenced by the networks of researchers that contribute to it. This paper describes one of such networks: the Spanish Network of Learning Analytics (SNOLA). The paper presents the research lines of the members of SNOLA, as well as the main challenges that learning analytics has...

In Latin American universities, Learning Analytics (LA) has been perceived as a promising opportunity to leverage data to meet the needs of a diverse student cohort. Although universities have been collecting educational data for years, the adoption of LA in this region is still limited due to the lack of expertise and policies for processing and u...

Learning Analytics (LA) is perceived to be a promising strategy to tackle persisting educational challenges in Latin America, such as quality disparities and high dropout rates. However, Latin American universities have fallen behind in LA adoption compared to institutions in other regions. To understand stakeholders' needs for LA services, this st...

Tools are an essential support in any human activity. As the technology advances, we are able to design more advanced tools that help us in doing the activities more efficiently. Recently, we have seen breakthroughs in the two main components of tools, namely the interface and the computing engine behind. Natural interfaces allow us to communicate...

In education, several studies have tried to track student persistence (i.e., students’ ability to keep on working on the assigned tasks) using different definitions and self-reported data. However, self-reported metrics may be limited, and currently, online courses allow collecting many low-level events to analyze student behaviors based on logs an...

To assist higher education institutions in meeting the challenge of limited student engagement in the implementation of Learning Analytics services, the Questionnaire for Student Expectations of Learning Analytics (SELAQ) was developed. This instrument contains 12 items, which are explained by a purported two‐factor structure of “Ethical and Privac...

This chapter analyzes the different implications of the new MOOC paradigm in assessment activities, emphasizing the differences with respect to other non MOOC educational technology environments and giving an insight about the redesign of assessment activities for MOOCs. The chapter also compares the different assessment activities that are availab...

The advancement of learning analytics has enabled the development of predictive models to forecast learners’ behaviors and outcomes (e.g., performance). However, many of these models are only applicable to specific learning environments and it is usually difficult to know which factors influence prediction results, including the predictor variables...

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have usually high dropout rates. Many articles have proposed predictive models in order to early detect learners at risk to alleviate this issue. Nevertheless, existing models do not consider complex high-level variables, such as self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies, which can have an important effect on lear...

To start medical or dentistry studies in Flanders, prospective students need to pass a central admission test. A blended program with four Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs) was designed to support those students. The logs from the platform provide an opportunity to delve into the learners’ interactions and to develop predictive models to forecas...

Conversational agents, be they text- or voice-powered, are acquiring a level of maturity that makes them useful for natural and smart interactions. In this paper, we explore some design principles for voice-commanded assistants for educational use, in particular, of one designed to train Java concepts as a complement to a MOOC (Massive Open Online...

Nowadays, there are quite a few experiences of the use of the flipped classroom (FC) in engineering education due to their advantages in comparison with the traditional methodology. The possibility of promoting students’ active learning under the FC can lead to improvements in the learning outcomes. Nonetheless, there are several issues that arise...

Due to the increasing use of active learning methodologies such as the Flipped Classroom, which usually use group activities, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) have the opportunity of supporting them. In this work, we present a group formation tool that allows teachers to create easily and efficiently groups of students based on the K-means algor...

In recent years, Learning Analytics (LA) has captured the attention of higher education managers who saw in this research field a means to optimize the process of teaching and learning on a large scale. So far, most studies in LA have concentrated on the development of tools to address educational challenges in the contexts of Europe, Australia, an...

One of the characteristics of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) is that the overall number of social interactions tend to be higher than in traditional courses, hindering the analysis of social learning. Learners typically ask or answer questions using the forum. This makes messages a rich source of information, which can be used to infer learner...

This paper presents the SmartLET project, a coordinated research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, which just started in 2018. The main aim of this project is to provide support for the design and orchestration of Smart Learning Environments (SLEs) with the support of learning analytics and the Internet...

In the past years, predictive models in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have focused on forecasting learners’ success through their grades. The prediction of these grades is useful to identify problems that might lead to dropouts. However, most models in prior work predict categorical and continuous variables using low-level data. This paper co...

This paper surveys the state of the art on prediction in MOOCs through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The main objectives are: (1) to identify the characteristics of the MOOCs used for prediction, (2) to describe the prediction outcomes, (3) to classify the prediction features, (4) to determine the techniques used to predict the variables, a...

One of the most investigated questions in education is to know which factors or variables affect learning. The prediction of learning outcomes can be used to act on students in order to improve their learning process. Several studies have addressed the prediction of learning outcomes in intelligent tutoring systems environments with intensive use o...

The learning process in a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) can be improved from knowing in advance learners’ grades on different assignments. This would be very useful to detect problems with enough time to take corrective measures. In this work, the aim is to analyse how different course scores can be predicted, what elements or variables affect...

MOOCs have made it possible not only to provide quality open education for any learner worldwide, but also to rethink the way on-campus teaching is delivered. The materials produced for a MOOC can be consumed by on-campus students before arriving to the classroom, using class time to do activities that promote active learning, following this way a...

One of the reported methods of cheating in online environments in the literature is CAMEO (Copying Answers using Multiple Existences Online), where harvesting accounts are used to obtain correct answers that are later submitted in the master account which gives the student credit to obtain a certificate. In previous research we developed an algorit...

Educational computer-based competition environments need to be designed with a set of features that enhance the learning process. Although recently some frameworks for the design of educational computer-based systems (e.g., educational games) have been proposed, they do not focus on the details of the competition. Therefore, the design of education...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to evaluate four visualizations that represent affective states of students. Design/methodology/approach An empirical-experimental study approach was used to assess the usability of affective state visualizations in a learning context. The first study was conducted with students who had knowledge of visualiza...

Detection and visualizations of affective states of students in computer based learning environments have been proposed to support student awareness and improve learning. However, the evaluation of such visualizations with students in real life settings is an open issue. This research reports on our experiences from the use of four different types...

The emergence of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) makes available big amounts of data about students’ interaction with online educational platforms. This allows for the possibility of making predictions about future learning outcomes of students based on these interactions. The prediction of certificate accomplishment can enable the early detect...

Online learning has become very popular over the last decade. However , there are still many details that remain unknown about the strategies that students follow while studying online. In this study, we focus on the direction of detecting 'invisible' collaboration ties between students in online learning environments. Specifically, the paper prese...

This paper presents a detailed study of a form of academic dishonesty that involves the use of multiple accounts for harvesting solutions in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). It is termed CAMEO – Copying Answers using Multiple Existence Online. A person using CAMEO sets up one or more harvesting accounts for collecting correct answers; these are...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have recently emerged as a revolution in education. Due to the huge amount of users, it is difficult for teachers to provide personalized instruction. Learning analytics computer applications have emerged as a solution. At present, MOOC platforms provide low support for learning analytics visualizations, and a ch...

The Universidad Carlos III de Madrid has been offering several face-to-face remedial courses for new students to review or learn concepts and practical skills that they should know before starting their degree program. During 2012 and 2013, our University adopted MOOC-like technologies to support some of these courses so that a blended learning met...