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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a disruptive new development in higher education which combines openness and scalability in a most powerful way. They have the potential to widen participation in higher education. Thus, they contribute to social inclusion, the dissemination of knowledge and pedagogical innovation and also the internationalization of higher education institutions. However, one of the critical elements for a massive open language learning experience to be successful is to empower learners and to facilitate networked learning experiences. In fact, MOOCs are designed for an undefined number of participants thus serving a high heterogeneity of profiles, with diverse learning styles and prior knowledge, and also contexts of participation and diversity of online platforms. Personalization can play a key role in this process. The iMOOC pedagogical model introduced the principle of diversity to MOOC design, allowing for a clear differentiation of learning paths and also virtual environments. In this article the authors present a proposal based on the iMOOC approach for a new framework for personalizing and adapting MOOCs designed in a collaborative, networked pedagogical approach by identifying each participant's competence profile and prior knowledge as well as the respective mobile communication device used and to generate matching personalized learning. This paper also shows the results obtained in a laboratory environment after an experiment has been performed with a prototype of the framework. It can be observed that creating personalized learning paths is possible and the next step is to test this framework with real experimental groups.Keywords: framework; adaptation; personalization; learning paths; mobile devices; MOOC. ResumenLos cursos en línea masivos y abiertos (MOOC) son una nueva tendencia rompedora en la educación superior. Estos cursos combinan la propiedad de ser abiertos con la posibilidad de ser escalables de una forma muy potente. Tienen el potencial de permitir la participación en la educación superior para todas las personas, a todos los niveles. Por lo tanto, contribuyen a la inclusión social, la difusión del conocimiento y la innovación pedagógica, así como la internalización de las instituciones de educación superior. Sin embargo, uno de los elementos críticos para que tenga éxito una experiencia de aprendizaje de forma abierta y masiva es potenciar y facilitar una red de aprendizaje. De hecho, los MOOC no están diseñados para un número predefinido de participantes por lo que sirven para un alto número de perfiles heterogéneos, con diversidad de estilos de aprendizaje y conocimientos previos, pero también contextos de participación y diversidad de plataformas online. La personalización puede desempeñar un papel clave en este proceso. El modelo pedagógico iMOOC introdujo el principio de diversidad en el diseño de MOOC, permitiendo una clara diferenciación de caminos de aprendizaje y también entornos virtuales. En este artículo los autores presentan una propuesta b...

New generations of students are highly involved with technology. Therefore, while coming to traditional classrooms, it is required to call for different forms of teaching that are more motivating and engaging for them. One approach to this problem is combining games and education. Gamification could be defined as the use of game design elements in non‐game contexts. The research gap in the literature could be found in requiring more experimental studies assessing if gamification can improve learning outcomes. To this end, this paper further contributes to determining if a gamified social e‐learning platform can improve the learning performance and engagement of MSc students. The developed platform combined submission of activities with points, achievements, leaderboards, and rewards (with a virtual store) and social elements such as friends, forums, Q&A, blogs, and microblogging. Results show that, indeed, social gamification is a suitable technique to improve the learning outcome of students, at least for those skills related to programming, providing more communication skills and producing more engagement and motivation while using the platform.

With the rise of mobile devices and the high number of instant messaging applications available in the stores, it is necessary to evaluate the usability of such applications to provide a more satisfying user experience. To this end, this paper presents a methodical usability evaluation of instant messaging applications both in iOS and Android platforms. A predefined evaluation was used, which was created to detect the main usability issues of mobile applications, regardless of the device used and the evaluated applications. Consequently, two methods were used: the keystroke level model and the mobile heuristic evaluation. Also, the results suggest that the main problems of this type of applications are difficulties in performing tasks (some of them were not agile nor easy to complete), lack of element cohesion (some icons and buttons did not follow the style of the operating system, bad translations, and too much information on the screen), problems with the user interface (pop-ups overlapping the status bar, clipped elements, sometimes the interface did not rotate, and, in other cases, the interface changed considerably when the device was rotated), and lack of information about privacy and security features. Finally, based on the results, we propose a set of recommendations that will be helpful for developers of this kind of applications.

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Nowadays, instant messaging applications (apps) are one of the most popular applications for mobile devices with millions of active users. However, mobile devices present hardware and software characteristics and limitations compared with personal computers. Hence, to address the usability issues of mobile apps, a specific methodology must be conducted. This paper shows the findings from a systematic analysis of these applications on iOS mobile platform that was conducted to identify some usability issues in mobile applications for instant messaging. The overall process includes a Keystroke-Level Modeling and a Mobile Heuristic Evaluation. In the same trend, we propose a set of guidelines for improving the usability of these apps. Based on our findings, this analysis will help in the future to create more effective mobile applications for instant messaging.