Sandra Sanchez-Gordon

Escuela Politécnica Nacional | EPN · Departament of Informatics and Computer Science

This paper proposal is to include MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) as creditable courses in engineering programs at the National Polytechnic School of Ecuador. In addition to fulfilling a number of requirements related to the content and duration of the courses, one important challenge is that these selected MOOCs should comply with web accessib...

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have been around since 2008, when 2,300 students took part in a course called "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" organized by University of Manitoba, Canada. The year 2012 was widely recognized as "The year of the MOOC", because several MOOC initiatives gained a world-wide popularity. Nowadays, many experts...

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities stresses that persons with disabilities should be able to participate fully in all aspects of life, including education. Nevertheless, statistics shows than a low percentage of persons with disabilities complete higher education. MOOCs, being online courses available to a very large number o...

This paper describes some of the challenges that exist to make accessible massive open online courses (MOOCs) on Geographical Information Systems (GIS). These courses are known by the generic name of Geo-MOOCs. A MOOC is an online course that is open to the general public for free, which causes a massive registration. A GIS is a computer applicatio...

Internet use by older people has increased dramatically during the past 10 years. According to different sources, the number of users over age 65 has more than doubled since 2000. Besides, the inevitable effect of younger users aging will increase the number of older people using the Internet the next decades. Unfortunately, older people face sever...

Changes generated by the pandemic have stimulated new forms of communication through technological devices. Thanks to these, augmentative and alternative communication through the use of pictograms has allowed the development of communicative capacity for people who face health problems, such as speech, limited motor skills, hearing, among others....

Phishing is a type of cyber-attack that aims to deceive users, usually using fraudulent web pages that appear legitimate. Currently, one of the most-common ways to detect these phishing pages according to their content is by entering words non-sequentially into Deep Learning (DL) algorithms, i.e., regardless of the order in which they have entered...

Phishing webpages are a type of cyber-attack whose objective is to try to deceive people through fraudulent web pages to harm its victims, commonly in an economical way. Every day new fraudulent web pages are created, so one of the standard methods to detect these recent attacks is the use of Artificial Intelligence algorithms based on the HTML con...

One of the most effective attacks on cybersecurity is Social Engineering, in which the attacker deceives an end-user to steal its credentials and perpetrate cyber-crimes. There are hardware and software countermeasures to deal with these types of attacks. However, people themselves are the most vulnerable link in this security chain. In addition, t...

In this study, a model based on convolutional neural networks is proposed to quickly and efficiently classify and identify a person's signature with over 90% accuracy. For this purpose, two signature datasets were used. The first, called CEDAR, is publicly available. The second set, called GC-DB, was collected by the researchers using uncontrolled...

People living with some type of disability continue to encounter barriers that prevent them from participating in society on equal terms and their rights continue to be violated. Among these rights, the full enjoyment of communication in an independent and accessible manner, using information and communication technologies, is a commitment acquired...

The change generated by the virtualization of activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the way people participate in countless activities. Scientific conferences, like many other events, were forced by the circumstances to change from face-to-face to online overnight. The goal of this study is to identify the accessibility barriers t...

Currently, there are millions of people who are studying professional training using e-Learning environments. A trend that has been exacerbated by the global health crisis caused by the COVID-19 virus pandemic. This circumstance has forced students around the world to switch to an emerging online modality in 2020. E-Learning environments has become...

There are millions of people worldwide using e-Learning platforms. However, people with disabilities still have problems using these platforms due to a lack of accessibility. In the present study, a model for the generation of the profiles of users with disabilities is proposed. This model enables e-Learning platforms to have information on users’...

The purpose of this chapter is to present a seven-year journey to understand the barriers that people face when interacting with e-learning and e-health online platforms and to come up with software engineering solutions to make these platforms more inclusive. This chapter per the author presents a set of contributions intended to serve as stepping...

There are a myriad of software development methods, methodologies, frameworks, techniques and practices in both traditional and agile software development. Seeking synergy between these approaches has become necessary for the evolution of a software development process. Software companies deal with that challenge by combining well-structured compre...

Education is a fundamental human right recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Current e-Learning environments enable education at large scale with reduced costs. Unfortunately, persons with disabilities (PWD) experience barriers to access these platforms and the educational resources they host. To contribute with solving this prob...

Children with Special Needs may have difficulty understanding the content of a book or associating words and sentences with their meaning. Teachers use the storytelling as a powerful literacy tool which engage children in making connections between academic content and pedagogy. This strategy is also useful to integrate the diversity of the classro...

Assistive technologies have allowed people with disabilities to overcome many barriers. For instance, people with visual disabilities are able to access information on the Web by using screen readers and generating different actions in their navigation, which would not be possible without assistive technology. The generation of accessible resources...

En la Seguridad Informática, no importa queequipamiento de Software o Hardware se tengainstalado, porque siempre el eslabón más débil en estacadena de seguridad es el usuario final. De esta premisase valen los diferentes tipos de ataque de IngenieríaSocial, cuyo objetivo principal es obtener informacióncasi directamente de los usuarios, con la fina...

The technological proposal here elaborated consists of a cellphone app denominated Mind & Brain which encompasses subcomponents that allow the compensation of each frontal lobe function. In the component of planning, for example, this application allows a person to have an electronic diary to set daily activities to accomplish and will have the opp...

La Ingeniería Social es la técnica que permite obtener información confidencial de los usuarios, de manera fraudulenta, con la finalidad de usarla en contra de ellos mismos, o de las organizaciones en las que laboran. Este estudio presenta un experimento enfocado a crear conciencia acerca de las consecuencias de este tipo de ataque, mediante la eje...

Young children as well as children with special educational needs learn from their environment with social, emotional and physical stimuli. In this context, educational resources and teaching strategies play a main role for them in order to understand the new information. This paper describes the experience of building hybrid interfaces that combin...

In the actuality there are many devices to help people with visual disability, at the level of mobile devices like Smart Phones, tablets, PCS, some of them increasing the size of the letter, or reading icons or maybe incorporating voice technology to read the text or to recognize the voice, these devices help to people with visual disability that t...

Education worldwide is a significant aspect for the development of the peoples and much more in developing countries such as those in Latin America, where less than 22% of its inhabitants have higher education. Research in this field is a matter of interest for each of the governments to improve education policies. Therefore, the analysis of data o...

This chapter presents accessibility requirements that need to be considered in the design, implementation and evaluation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to ensure they are inclusive. Accessibility requirements take in account particular needs, preferences, skills and situations of diverse learners, e.g. people with disabilities, elderly peop...

This chapter presents in a descriptive and visual way the evolution of accessibility metadata in educational resources, considering the different organizations and projects that contributed in investigations and establishment of standards for their implementation. The purpose is to justify the importance of its application in the optimal search of...

There is an increasing need of qualified workers and professionals that use ecollaboration to solve local problems with global perspectives. There is also a need to improve employability of citizens of developing countries by training them in new skills and knowledges. Massive open online courses’ platforms provide the infrastructure to develop and...

It is important to raise awareness among people who create web content about barriers that exist for people with visual disabilities to perceive images. This study had for purpose the implementation of features and controls for insertion of accessible images in two open online editors: TinyMCE and Summernote. TinyMCE is used in content management s...

When evaluating the learning styles of several individuals using the Honey-Alonso test, some users did not understand the meaning of several of the questions. This may be due to problems of context, tiredness in front of the extension of the test, lack of understanding or disinterest. The Honey-Alonso test consists of four groups of twenty question...

At present, the lack of adequate methods to test whether a mobile application is accessible has become a major challenge for accessibility experts. This study was applied to ten mobile applications, the most popular according to PCMAG. We propose to use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 through manual review and automatic review with the...

This study proposes the use of Think Aloud and Focus Group methods for evaluating the usability of the Intelligent Police Patrolling System (I-Pat). The study was conducted with twenty-one students of computer engineering. The study included two evaluation methods. First, the application of Think Aloud using audio recordings, image capturing and qu...

The goal of a telerehabilitation platform is to safely and securely facilitate the rehabilitation of patients through the use of telecommunication technologies complemented with the use of biomedical smart sensors. The purpose of this study was to perform a usability evaluation of a telerehabilitation platform. To improve the level of usability, th...

In the last years, software applications for medical assistance, including the telerehabilitation, have known a high and continuous presence in the medical area. Guaranteeing the correct use of these applications induces to incorporate a study of usability in the life cycle of any interactive system. This paper synthesizes the results obtained from...

The Tele-Rehabilitation platform for hip surgery allows patients to carry out part of their rehabilitation at home, without the need to travel long distances to a rehabilitation centre. A lack of usability that may prevent effectiveness, efficiency, and the satisfaction of patients, may lead to problems of confusion, error and delay, or even abando...

Using a tele-rehabilitation platform for motor recovery obliges the user to interact at a remote distance from the computer. In such a situation, a natural user interface can be used both to record the therapeutic movements performed by the patient, and to navigate in the web application. Nevertheless, it is necessary to assess the user experience...

The present work proposes a model of detection of movements of patients in rehabilitation of hip surgery in real time. The model applies the Fuzzy Logic technique to identify correct and incorrect movements in the execution of rehabilitation exercises using the motion capture device called XBOXONE Microsoft’s Kinect. An algorithm generates a multiv...

This paper explains some of the challenges that exist to make accessible the web interfaces of a Tele-rehabilitation platform for hip arthroplasty patients and propose an iterative method to improve the level of accessibility using automatic evaluation tools. Web accessibility is not concerned with the specific conditions of people who use the Web,...

This research is part of a telemedicine platform project to guide and accompany the patient online, during rehabilitation after total or partial hip replacement surgery. The study proposes to apply the Accessibility Guidelines for educational content in accordance with the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) accessibility guidelines. The main functi...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have a prominent role in achieving universal e-education, i.e., education offered via the Internet to diverse learners around the world independently of their motivations, backgrounds, capacities, and limitations. Regrettably, current MOOCs platforms and contents are not accessible enough for all learners. This s...

Cloud computing is an emerging solution that responds to the concept of Smart University; it aims at offering an intelligent environment of business continuity for the actors of an educational center. This research offers a recovery plan of educational services in case of disaster, through an action research, which analyzed free software for cloud...

This article proposes an e-learning process for engineering educators involving a self-training approach. To develop the process, the researchers considered a set of entries to allow enrolled educators to engage in and successfully complete a training program without a lead instructor using an e-learning platform. In addition, the proposed process...

Massive open online courses (MOOC) are online courses in which there are no requirements for students to enroll and that have the capacity to serve thousands or even hundreds of thousands of students simultaneously. MOOCs are complex to develop due to their dual nature: on the one hand, they are an educational product; on the other hand, they are a...

Los cursos en línea masivos y abiertos son cursos en los que no se exige ningún requisito para que los estudiantes puedan inscribirse y que tienen la capacidad para atender a cientos de miles de estudiantes de forma simultánea. Los MOOC son complejos de desarrollar y gestionar debido a su naturaleza dual: por un lado son un producto educativo y por...

There are millions of people worldwide—of all ages, conditions, backgrounds, and motivations—with significant learning needs. Unfortunately, traditional education is not efficient enough to meet these needs. That is, the available educational resources are not fully exploited to help cover the demand. There is an increasing need for large-scale acc...

Los principales resultados que se han obtenido en este trabajo de investigación son: la caracterización del problema de la accesibilidad de los MOOC, una recopilación del estado de la cuestión mediante una revisión sistemática de la literatura, la validación del nivel de accesibilidad de plataformas y contenidos MOOC, la identificación de requisito...

Currently, more than one billion people live with some form of disability. A person's environment has a huge impact on the extent and impact of their disability, e.g. inaccessible environments create disability by creating barriers, while accessible environments diminish disability and enable full participation and inclusion. Web applications are o...

The “best practices” of international software standards are considered important in improving the software process. The ISO/IEC 29110 standard defines lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities (VSEs) and VSEs have also been recognized important in the software industry. Since this standard is novel, practitioners need to be actively engaged in th...

El fenómeno de los MOOCs no se ha desarrollado con la misma intensidad en los países de Iberoamérica que en otros países. La novedad del fenómeno MOOC conlleva la falta información fiable y contrastada, por lo que es difícil analizar lo que ha pasado y está pasando en Iberoamérica para que se produzca esta situación. En este capítulo intentamos apo...

This study presents the results of a web accessibility evaluation performed on a sample of six software products developed by small software enterprises of two countries. According to the International Standard Organization (ISO), an enterprise, organization, department or project with up to 25 people is considered small. All the products evaluated...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have great potential to provide learning opportunities for people around the world. However, to reach their full potential, MOOCs need to meet the accessibility needs of diverse learners, with and without disabilities. In the literature review, we have found some published research on accessibility evaluations of...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have great potential to provide learning opportunities for people around the world. However, to reach their full potential, MOOCs need to meet the accessibility needs of diverse learners, with and without disabilities. In the literature review, we have found some published research on accessibility evaluations of...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have great potential to provide learning opportunities for people around the world. However, to reach their full potential, MOOCs need to meet the accessibility needs of diverse learners, with and without disabilities. In the literature review, we have found some published research on accessibility evaluations of...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have great potential to provide learning opportunities for people around the world. However, to reach their full potential, MOOCs need to meet the accessibility needs of diverse learners, with and without disabilities. In the literature review, we have found some published research on accessibility evaluations of...

In this paper, we present a set of twenty features for managing accessible images when generating educational content. With this set of features, we assessed a sample of eight e-Learning platforms and found that, regarding image accessibility, Moodle and Sakai are the most accessible e-Learning platforms, whereas edX and Udemy are the least accessi...

e-Education is the area of e-Government that involves the use of information technologies for education. The implementation of e-Education initiatives faces huge challenges in countries with low and medium human development levels due to budget constraints and lack of infrastructure, among other limitations. In this context, massive open online cou...

e-Education is the area of e-Government that involves the use of information technologies for education. The implementation of e-Education initiatives faces huge challenges in countries with low and medium human development levels due to budget constraints and lack of infrastructure, among other limitations. In this context, massive open online cou...

This chapter presents accessibility requirements that need to be considered in the design, implementation and evaluation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to ensure they are inclusive. Accessibility requirements take in account particular needs, preferences, skills and situations of diverse learners, e.g. people with disabilities, elderly peop...

This paper proposes a design for enabling accessible blended learning experiences for non-native speakers (NNS) using massive open online courses (MOOCs). It describes some of the challenges that NNS experience when participating in a MOOC and identifies the requirements that ought to be met to accomplish accessibility for NNS. The requirements wer...

This paper presents the description of a project to develop an accessible indoor plan to help blind people to localize landmarks within a building from a pedagogical perspective. This project has been employed to foster engineering students to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to use technologies and tools to develop accessible engineering...

La Convención sobre los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad establece que las personas con discapacidad deben poder participar plenamente en todos los aspectos de la vida, incluyendo la educación y el trabajo. Sin embargo, las estadísticas muestran que, en relación con la población en general, un bajo porcentaje de personas con discapacidad a...