José Ignacio Mayorga’s research while affiliated with National University of Distance Education and other places

In this paper we focus on the achievements of eMadrid initiative in some fields of technology-enhanced learning, mainly involving the improvement of the mechanisms for open educational content retrieval from Internet, considering Internet resources as potential learning objects. Also we facilitate the integration of remote laboratories and external tools in virtual campuses architectures supporting enriched capabilities and describe a way to cluster and identify learner weaknesses using a learning analytics approach in combination with the item response theory.

This paper proposes a retrieval architecture based on clustering techniques, to search the web for resources that are potentially useful for educational purposes. The architecture makes use of Formal Concept Analysis to search the web as a sort of learning object repository and returns a clustering of results based on pedagogical criteria that can help to provide a rich environment for content authoring, enhancing the possibilities of traditional search based on metadata. The retrieval system is designed to be seamlessly embedded in virtual learning environments or authoring tools, and combines information retrieval technologies with pedagogical objectives to help in the organization and sorting of search results in a meaningful way for educational content authors as well as grounding an approach for semantic-aware learning content retrieval.

In the last years, authoring based on e-learning standards has been consolidated as a core factor of industry and development of interoperable and effective virtual learning environments. However, there is a need for further research on abstraction to provide a more instructional view in the context of authoring tools in a variety of ways, in order to avoid being driven by Learning Technology (LT) specifications, facilitate instructional knowledge aggregation, and to provide an appropriate level of clarity and semantics in the design of collaborative activities. We propose a combination of techniques to provide this instructional abstraction in the context of the new European educational model, combining instructional layers and collaborative scripts in authoring tools, and semantic web techniques for extending e-learning material in order to harness the wealth of existing web content and semantically labeled repositories.

This paper proposes using clustering techniques, such as Formal Concept Analysis to search the web for resources which are potentially useful for educational purposes and returning a clustering of results based on pedagogical criteria. Using the web as a sort of learning object repository can help providing a rich environment for content authoring and enhancing the possibilities of traditional search based on metadata. Combining IR technologies and pedagogical objectives may help organizing and sorting search results in a meaningful way for educational content authors as well as grounding an approach for semantic-aware learning content retrieval.

This paper presents a system, which allows collaborative learning communities to share and to work around a common body of knowledge through a Learning Object Repository (LOR, for short. The LOR stores any results and by-products generated throughout the learning process by using a number of different tools.) There is a virtual learning community, which provides a workspace where users can collaborate to carry out group activities. An interaction infrastructure supports these activities by offering a set of services such as shared workspaces, chat rooms or discussion forums. Students elaborate by-products, which are then stored as learning objects. These, in turn, articulate collaboration by means of successive changes along instructional activities. LOs are stored along with automatically extracted or elicited meta-information coming either from the context or from the tools that have been used to handle these LO's. Metadata are then added, by means of an abstraction process, to an ontology, which facilitates reasoning about each element within the system, particularly, about the available contextual information. Furthermore, the ontology provides complex semantic searching.

En este artículo, se presenta un sistema que permite que comunidades virtuales de aprendizaje colaborativo compartan y trabajen en torno a un cuerpo de conocimiento común a través de un Repositorio de Objetos de Aprendizaje (LOR, capaz de almacenar material generado en el proceso de aprendizaje usando diferentes herramientas.) Se dispone de una comunidad virtual de aprendizaje que proporciona un lugar de trabajo en el que los usuarios pueden colaborar para llevar a cabo las actividades de grupo, para las que se ofrece una infraestructura de interacción establecida sobre un conjunto de servicios tales como espacios de trabajo compartidos, salas de charla o foros de discusión. Los alumnos elaboran productos (resultados parciales) que se almacenan en forma de objetos de aprendizaje y articulan la colaboración mediante sucesivas modificaciones a lo largo de las actividades instruccionales. Los productos se almacenan en la forma de objetos de aprendizaje (LO), con metainformación extraída automáticamente del contexto y de las herramientas que se utilizan para manipularlos. Los metadatos se incorporan, mediante un proceso de abstracción, a una ontología que permite razonar sobre todos los elementos del sistema, en particular, sobre la información contextual, además de posibilitar búsquedas semánticas complejas.

This paper describes ongoing work on the issue of exploiting a Learning Object Repository, i.e., a large library of learning resources, which incorporates different and often heterogeneous types of objects, to feed activities to a Virtual Learning Community. These objects include re-usable contents that are described by means of metadata. Our proposal leans on an ontology for interpreting the annotations and suggesting the LO best fitting the community’s necessities for a given activity. The ontology, as a representation mechanism, interprets all the available knowledge and provides adequate ways of exploiting it, which include social navigation and recommendation through enhanced searching capabilities.

This paper deals with a portal for a group or community organisation and how to take advantage of having an ontology to support its operation and services. The ontology, as a representation mechanism, interprets all the available knowledge and provides adequate ways of exploiting it, which include enhanced searching capabilities to facilitate social navigation. The ontology takes into account the context and users' working style to assist the learners.

Communication through artefacts, in the sense of objects (co-)constructed by learners, is a well known mechanism in synchronous shared workspace environments. In this article, we explore the potential of extending this principle to heterogeneous, anonymous and asynchronous learner communities by drawing on existing work, e.g. in the areas of "social navigation" and recommender systems. A new ingredient is the description and provision of "thematic objects" embedded in a task/activity context. Design principles and available technologies are discussed and an example implementation in a European project is presented from the perspective of technology design and development.

This paper focuses on the formation and control of virtual learning communities at different levels. A social approach is presented. It is based on having a explicit computational model representing the social aspects of the community, which is established by a meta-model and a ruling mechanism. The first one allows a wide range of social structures to be derived from a high-level definition. The latter permits the tuning of the society behaviour. Both aspects are stated in a declarative way, which yields three important advantages: generality, which allows a social structure to be defined easily; flexibility, which facilitates making changes in the society or its behaviour and adaptability, because such a model can cope with a wide range of behaviours. The framework has been implemented in a semantic platform that pays a special attention to the underlying social structure.