Practical learning methodologies have become the need of the hour in the education sector, in particular in engineering education, to achieve technical competencies and skills. Advancements in web-based learning strategies have evolved over the years, and technology has played a major role in creating e-learning resources, among which remote labs…

With today's high demand for online applications and services running on the Internet, software has become a vital component in our lives. With every revolutionary technology comes challenges unique to its characteristics; for online applications, security is one huge concern and challenge. Currently, there are several schemes that address…

Research related to online discussions frequently faces the problem of analyzing huge corpora. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies may allow automating this analysis. However, the state-of-the-art in machine learning and text mining approaches yields models that do not transfer well between corpora related to different topics. Also,…

The advent of Web 2.0, also called the Social Web, has changed the way people interact with the Web. Assisted by the technologies associated with this new trend, users now play a much more active role as content providers. This Web paradigm shift has also changed how companies operate and interact with their employees, partners and customers. The…

The continuously growth of learning resources available in on-line repositories has raised the concern for the development of automated methods for quality assessment. The current existence of on-line evaluations in such repositories has opened the possibility of searching for statistical profiles of highly-rated resources that can be used as…

Learning objects (LOs) are digital or non-digital entities used for learning, education or training commonly stored in repositories searchable by their associated metadata. Unfortunately, based on the current standards, such metadata is often missing or incorrectly entered making search difficult or impossible. In this paper, we investigate…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is describing the seamless integration of the question-answer interaction into automatic lecture recordings (ALRs). This includes the design and implementation of the question management (QM) software for a virtual camera team. Design/methodology/approach: Coming from the human role model the interaction and its…

Communication underwater is challenging because of the inherent characteristics of the media. First, common radio frequency (RF) signals utilized in wireless communications cannot be used under water. RF signals are attenuated in such as way that RF communication underwater is restricted to very few meters. As a result, acoustic-based…

Purpose: Playing back recorded lectures on handheld devices offers interesting perspectives for learning, but suffers from small screen sizes. The purpose of this paper is to propose several semi-automatic post-processing steps in order to improve usability by providing a better readability and additional navigation functionality.…

This work describes a new "Moodle" module developed to give support to the practical content of a basic computer organization course. This module goes beyond the mere hosting of resources and assignments. It makes use of an automatic checking and verification engine that works on the VHDL designs submitted by the students. The module automatically…

This paper reports on an aspect of the EC funded Argunaut project which researched and developed awareness tools for moderators of online dialogues. In this study we report on an investigation into the nature of creative thinking in online dialogues and whether or not this creative thinking can be coded for and recognized automatically such that…

This paper describes how digital talking books (DTBs) with embedded functionality for learners can be generated from content structured according to the OU OpenLearn schema. It includes examples showing how a software transformation developed from open source components can be used to remix OpenLearn content, and discusses issues concerning the…

Recent progress in wireless and sensor technologies has lead to a new development of learning environments, called context-aware ubiquitous learning environment, which is able to sense the situation of learners and provide adaptive supports. Many researchers have been investigating the development of such new learning environments; nevertheless,…