The researchers of the SmartLET project from the GSIC/EMIC research group, Paraskevi Topali, Dr. Adolfo Ruiz-Calleja and Dr. Konstantinos Michos, attended the 15th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2020), held online, between the 14th and 17th of September, 2020. During the event, the researchers participated and presented their work through the different sessions.
PhD candidate Paraskevi Topali and Dr. Irene-Angelica Chounta (University of Tartu, Estonia) organized the workshop “CoFeeMOOC: Designing Contingent Feedback for Massive Open Online Courses“, that regarded the design of contingent feedback for MOOCs. The high interest in MOOCs and their current adoption from primary to tertiary levels due to Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, require a careful design and application on the provision of appropriate feedback practices. In particular, this workshop aimed to familiarize participants with the current identification of learners facing difficulties, highlight the importance of addressing potential student problems together with the learning design of the course, and reflect on specific feedback strategies.
Dr. Adolfo Ruiz-Calleja presented the work “CasualLearn: A smart application to learn History of Art” during the demonstration session of the conference. This application exploits the Web of Data to bridge formal and informal learning . Casual Learn offers informal learning tasks to students based on their context: their geolocation, the activity they do and the topics covered in their formal education. In its current version, Casual Learn uses a dataset of more than 16,000 contextualized informal learning tasks from the Spanish region of Castile and Leon that were semi-automatically created exploiting Open Data from the Web. This research was awarded with the Best Demo Award of the conference.
Konstantinos Michos presented the paper entitled “Design of Conversational Agents for CSCL: Comparing Two Types of Agent Intervention Strategies in a University Classroom“. This paper describes a pedagogical design space of conversational agents for collaborative learning composed of three dimensions: task design, domain model and agent intervention strategies. The authors performed an initial field study in a university classroom with 54 students. The study compared two types of agent intervention strategies which differ on student participation, dialogue and satisfaction. This work was awarded with the Best Research Paper Award of the conference.
Citations:
- Ruiz-Calleja, A., Bote-Lorenzo, M.L., Vega-Gorgojo, G., Serrano-Iglesias, S., García-Zarza, P., Asensio-Pérez, J.I., Gómez-Sánchez, E. (2020) CasualLearn: A Smart Application to Learn History of Art. In Proceedings of Fifteenth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning. Heidelberg, Germany.
- Michos, K., Asensio-Pérez, J.I., Dimitriadis, Y., García-Sastre, S., Villagrá-Sobrino, S., Ortega-Arranz, A., Gómez-Sánchez, E., Topali, P. (2020) Design of Conversational Agents for CSCL: Comparing Two Types of Agent Intervention Strategies in a University Classroom. In Proceedings of Fifteenth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning. Heidelberg, Germany.