In addition to being a well-liked form of recreation, escape rooms have drawn the attention of educators due to their ability to foster teamwork, leadership, creative thinking, and communication in a way that is engaging for students. As a consequence, educational escape rooms are emerging as a new type of learning activity under the promise of enhancing students' learning through highly engaging experiences. These activities consist of escape rooms that incorporate course materials within their puzzles in such a way that students are required to master these materials in order to succeed. Although several studies have reported on the use of escape rooms in a wide range of disciplines, prior research falls short of addressing the use of educational escape rooms for teaching programming, one of the most valuable skills of the twentyfirst century that students often have difficulties grasping. This paper reports on the use of an educational escape room in a programming course at a higher education institution and provide, for the first time, insights on the instructional effectiveness of using educational escape rooms for teaching programming. The results of this paper show that appropriate use of educational escape rooms can have significant positive impacts on student engagement and learning in programming courses. These results also suggest that students prefer these activities over traditional computer laboratory sessions. Finally, another novel contribution of this paper is a set of recommendations and proposals for educators in order to help them create effective educational escape rooms for teaching programming.

This work was supported by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) for Propuesta y validación de una metodología para el uso de escape rooms educativas mediante una plataforma web under Grant IE1819.0905.

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Automated assessment systems are increasingly used in higher education programming courses since the manual assessment of programming assignments is very time-consuming. Although a substantial amount of research work has been done on systems for the automatic assessment of programming assignments, most studies are focused on technical characteristics and further research is needed for examining the effect of using these systems on students’ perceptions and performance. This paper examines the effect of using an instructor-centered tool for automatically assessing programming assignments on students’ perceptions and performance in a web development course at a higher education institution. A total of three data sources were used: a survey to collect data regarding students’ perceptions, and the grades of the student assignment submissions and of a practical programming exam in order to analyze the students’ performance. The results show that the incorporation of the automated assessment tool into the course was beneficial for the students, since it allowed for increasing their motivation, improving the quality of their works, and enhancing their practical programming skills. Nonetheless, a significant percentage of students found the feedback that was generated by the tool hard to understand and of little use, and the generated grades unfair.

Despite the efforts made, there is still an alarming difference between the digital competence that teachers have and the one they should have in order to develop their students' digital competence. The lack of teacher training in safe and responsible use of ICT is a special cause for concern. Online courses in MOOC format meet all the required conditions to offer a possible solution to the unavoidable and urgent need for initial and in-service teacher training in this area of digital competence. However, there is currently no evidence in the literature on the effectiveness of these courses for this purpose. This study examines the instructional effectiveness of courses in MOOC format for teacher training in the safe and responsible use of ICT by analysing three different official courses. The courses were analysed using three different methods: a questionnaire to measure participants’ perceptions, pre-tests and post-tests to measure the knowledge acquired, and LORI (Learning Object Review Instrument) to measure the quality of digital educational resources created by the participants. The results suggest that online courses in MOOC format are an effective way to train teachers in the safe and responsible use of ICT, and that these courses can enable the development of digital competence in the area of content creation. A pesar de los esfuerzos realizados, aún existe una alarmante diferencia entre la competencia digital que tienen los profesores y la que deberían tener para desarrollar la competencia digital en sus alumnos. De especial preocupación es la carencia de formación del profesorado en uso seguro y responsable de las TIC. Los cursos en línea con formato MOOC reúnen todas las condiciones necesarias para ofrecer una posible solución a la ineludible y apremiante necesidad de formación inicial y continua del profesorado en esta área de la competencia digital. Sin embargo, no existe actualmente evidencia en la literatura sobre la efectividad de estos cursos para tal cometido. Este estudio examina la efectividad instruccional de los cursos con formato MOOC para la formación del profesorado en el uso seguro y responsable de las TIC mediante el análisis de tres cursos oficiales diferentes. Estos se analizaron empleando tres instrumentos diferentes: un cuestionario para medir la percepción de los participantes, pre-tests y pos-tests para medir los conocimientos adquiridos y el instrumento LORI (Learning Object Review Instrument) para medir la calidad de recursos educativos digitales creados por los participantes. Los resultados sugieren que los cursos en línea con formato MOOC constituyen una forma efectiva de formar al profesorado en el uso seguro y responsable de las TIC, y que estos cursos pueden ayudar al desarrollo de la competencia digital en el área de creación de contenidos.

Abstract-The area of mobile city guides has grown really fast in the last years based on new mobile capabilities. This growth has been fostered by the evolution of ubiquitous systems and the great penetration of smartphones in the society. In this paper we propose a generic model to support a new way of visiting the city: instead of as a place for tourism, we see it as a place for learning in which located educational resources are available for end users. The model has been conceived as a way to encourage them to create their own educational tours, in which Learning Points Of Interest are set up to be discovered. Two main use cases are supported by the model: formal (conducted by a teacher) and informal (no educator is related to the learning experience) outdoor mobile learning. Details about the impact of the conjunction of tourism, learning and gamification dimensions in the model design, as well as about the model itself are provided. Finally, a mobile application prototype developed in the context of the FI-CONTENT European project is presented as a proof of concept of the model.

Authoring tools play a crucial role in the development of learning content facilitating the creation of Learning Objects. However, not much work has been done in order to determine if educators actually can use these tools to create effective and reusable Learning Objects in an easy way. This paper address this issue by presenting and evaluating an open source authoring tool called ViSH Editor. Three factors were evaluated: the usability and user acceptance of the authoring tool, the quality and learning effectiveness of the created Learning Objects, and the reusability of these resources. Usability was evaluated through a lab test and the user acceptance with a survey among 180 users. Quality evaluation was conducted using LORI (Learning Object Review Instrument). The learning effectiveness was evaluated through learner surveys and test scores. Finally, reusability was evaluated by using the LORI instrument, by measuring metadata quality using a set of metrics, and by a quantitative analysis of reuse. Results show that ViSH Editor is an authoring tool capable of allowing educators to create effective and reusable Learning Objects in an easy way. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 25:188–199, 2017; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI 10.1002/cae.21789

Learning Objects (LOs) have emerged as a cornerstone approach for the development and distribution of educational content. These resources are distributed by Learning Object Repositories (LORs), which can make it easier for users to find suitable LOs by using Recommender Systems (RSs). This paper presents a hybrid recommendation model for LORs that combines content-based, demographic and context-aware techniques, along with the use of quality and popularity metrics. This article also describes how the model has been used to implement two RSs for two real LORs: ViSH and Europeana. Each of these RSs was evaluated in terms of accuracy, utility, usability and satisfaction perceived by end users. Besides, an A/B testing was performed in ViSH to compare the recommendations of the RS with random suggestions. The results showed that the RSs had a high user acceptance in terms of utility, usability and satisfaction, and that the RSs significantly exceeded the performance achieved by the random recommendations.