Understanding the architecture of a processor can be uninteresting and deterring for computer science students, since low-level details of computer architecture are often perceived to lack real-world impact. These courses typically have a strong practical component where students learn the fundamentals of the computer architecture and the handling…

The computer input/output (I/O) subsystem and its functioning are very abstract concepts that are difficult for undergraduate freshmen to understand. However, it is important that freshmen assimilate these low-level concepts if they are going to be taught about the operating systems (OS) working over that architecture layer, or working directly…

The cloud has become a widely used term in academia and the industry. Education has not remained unaware of this trend, and several educational solutions based on cloud technologies are already in place, especially for software as a service cloud. However, an evaluation of the educational potential of infrastructure and platform clouds has not…

Studying fundamental Computer Architecture and Organization topics requires a significant amount of practical work if students are to acquire a good grasp of the theoretical concepts presented in classroom lectures or textbooks. The use of simulators is commonly adopted in order to reach this objective. However, as most of the available…

This paper describes how a new "Moodle" module, called "CTPracticals", is applied to the teaching of the practical content of a basic computer organization course. In the core of the module, an automatic verification engine enables it to process the VHDL designs automatically as they are submitted. Moreover, a straightforward…

This paper describes a practical experience of adapting the teaching of a course in Computer Technology (CT) to the new demands of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). CT is a core course taught in the first year of the degree program Technical Engineering in Management Computing in the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of A…

A considerable amount of experiences in teaching object-oriented concepts using the Java language have been reported to date, some of which describe language pitfalls and concrete learning difficulties. In this paper, a number of additional issues that have been experienced as difficult for students to master, along with approaches intended to…

The identification and integration of reusable and customizable CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning) may benefit from the capture of best practices in collaborative learning structuring. The authors have proposed CLFPs (Collaborative Learning Flow Patterns) as a way of collecting these best practices. To facilitate the process of CLFPs…

Personalization technology has become an important topic in e-commerce, fostered by the emergence of the relationship-marketing paradigm. But teaching e-commerce personalization technology is a challenging task, since it requires a balance between marketing and management and technical implementation issues that must be calibrated according to the…

The Second International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM2009) was held at the University of Cordoba, Spain, on July 1-3, 2009. EDM brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large data sets to answer educational research questions. The increase in instrumented…