In distance education courses with a large number of students and groups, the organization and facilitation of collaborative writing tasks are challenging. Teachers need support for planning, specification, execution, monitoring, and evaluation of collaborative writing tasks in their course. This requires a collaborative learning platform for…

In conventional laboratories, engineering students must attend in person to conduct experiments with real equipment in a physical place, where their work is mainly assessed through self-reports and attendance records. By comparison, online labs can record and analyze students' activities and behaviors automatically. Thus, this article proposes a…

The rise of online programming education has necessitated more effective personalized interactions, a gap that PythonPal aims to fill through its innovative learning system integrated with a chatbot. This research delves into PythonPal's potential to enhance the online learning experience, especially in contexts with high student-to-teacher ratios…

Computer-supported collaborative learning aims to use information technologies to support collaborative knowledge construction by practicing the relevant pedagogical approaches, especially in the distance learning setting. The enabling technologies are fast advancing, and the need for solutions during the COVID-19 global pandemic led to the…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many students lost opportunities to explore science in labs due to school closures. Remote labs provide a possible solution to mitigate this loss. However, most remote labs to date are based on a somehow centralized model in which experts design and conduct certain types of experiments in well-equipped facilities,…

Forming groups in distance education is challenging for teachers because, with this modality, only 20% of the classes are held in person with the students. Thus, it is essential to achieve satisfactory results with automated approaches that can help teachers. In this article, an automated approach is proposed to assist teachers in recommending…

The application of the collective intelligence (CI) concept has yielded significant results in many knowledge areas and it has substantial potential to yield results in the educational context. In view of distance education and online educational technologies, the use of CI has enormous potential to improve collaboration, social learning, and…

This article introduces a novel approach to remote laboratory instruction, specifically designed for teaching three-dimensional modeling using Blender software. The lab uses virtual machines to provide students with the necessary computational power to carry out the course activities, along with the correct version of the software. The flipped…

This paper surveys the state of the art on prediction in MOOCs through a systematic literature review (SLR). The main objectives are: first, to identify the characteristics of the MOOCs used for prediction, second, to describe the prediction outcomes, third, to classify the prediction features, fourth, to determine the techniques used to predict…

This paper presents an in-depth empirical analysis of a nine-week MOOC. This analysis provides novel results regarding participants' profiles and use of built-in and external social tools. The results served to detect seven participants' patterns and conclude that the forum was the social tool preferred to contribute to the MOOC.

The ability of lecture videos to capture the different modalities of a class interaction make them a good review tool. Multimedia capable devices are ubiquitous among contemporary students. Many lecturers are leveraging this popularity by distributing videos of lectures. They depend on the university to provide the video capture infrastructure.…

The use of video lectures in distance learning involves the two major problems of searchability and active user participation. In this paper, we promote the implementation and usage of a collaborative educational video annotation functionality to overcome these two challenges. Different use cases and requirements, as well as details of the…

Multimedia educational resources play an important role in education, particularly for distance learning environments. With the rapid growth of the multimedia web, large numbers of educational video resources are increasingly being created by several different organizations. It is crucial to explore, share, reuse, and link these educational…