For the new educational models, it is essential to include teaching strategies that allow students to customize their learning based on their competencies, skills, and preferences, as well as strategies that support individual monitoring of student learning. However, the implementation of these strategies in teaching is complex for professors, and it gets complicated, as the number of students in the class-room increases. In this work, the design and development of a mobile learning platform are presented, which provides the professor and student with multiple services for the learning monitoring and customization based on learning styles, context information, and mobile learning objects. Our platform is composed of three main components: (1) A mobile learning object generator system, (2) A learning object repository, and (3) A student-oriented mobile application. The in-tegration of these three components allows and facilitates the professor the im-plementation of various strategies for monitoring and customization of learning systematically. We carried out a usability assessment of the learning object gener-ator system through a field study with five research professors. According to the obtained results, the learning object generator system presents a good acceptance, satisfaction, and applicability from the professors' perspective.

Currently, there is a trend to develop context-aware mobile distributed systems (MDS), such as systems that recommend places according to the location and the path of users. Some of the key challenges in the development of this type of systems are the following: acquisition, management and use of data context. In this paper, we propose two-level software architecture to obtain, use and provide context information in a MDS. From our point of view, the proposed architecture takes into account the requirements that emerge from data collection, use and management of context, as well as the own features of MDS. Based on our software architecture, a context-aware group communication system is implemented, which allows members to have four types of context: physical activity, logical activity, location and level of sound.

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The paper describes the design and implementation of a semantic web service that retrieves theses and extends the keyword based-search of a DSpace repository taking into account the roles of advisors and steering committee members formally represented into a custom-made ontology. The service uses SPARQL queries and the serialization module of RDF DSpace, this links the item submission process and the ontology, thus the more theses are added into a repository, the more instances are inserted into the ontology. The paper provides empirical insights about how to reuse theses metadata and includes the results of an exploratory and self-management survey of usability heuristic evaluation of a web site that enables to access the proposed service. Heuristics were estimated with a purposive sample of students, teachers, and managers, the results indicated a high satisfaction level and showed that the service increased theses accessibility in the web environment. The service also generates semantically enriched datasets that coexist with the repository, they are of utility and value to educational organizations as they give institutional visibility. INDEX TERMS Educational technology, semantic web, web services, information retrieval.

This article presents a prototype called PMIIDAS. The prototype focuses on the creation of open educational resources based on pedagogical and institutional guidelines, their representation using semantic indexing, and the storage and retrieval thereof by Semantic Web technologies. The use of this prototype can have benefits such as the reuse of open educational resources, which are distributed in institutional repositories or educational platforms by applying a semantic approach, search and retrieval of relevant information can be done through the use of ontologies and user profiles; as well as the exchange of educational resources among educational institutions.

Mobile learning (m‐learning) refers to knowledge and abilities acquisition through the use of mobile technology anywhere at any time. Mobile learning objects (MLOs) are key elements for this teaching paradigm; several software tools have been proposed to support the construction of MLOs; however, they do not take into account pedagogical and technological aspects simultaneously during the construction cycle of MLOs. This paper presents the analysis, design, and development of a web system called SiGOAM, which supports specialized services to professors to generate quality MLOs. These services follow a formal MLO's construction cycle integrated into four phases: analysis, design, development, and product‐oriented assessment. As a result of this formal approach, the proposed system generates quality MLOs that are embedded in mobile devices and accessed through web browsers. We performed a usability assessment of our system SiGOAM based on a field study. The results show that professors assigned acceptable values for effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.

A high-risk pregnancy is one in which pathological problems or abnormal conditions are latent during pregnancy and childbirth, increasing dangers to the mother’s or the infant’s health. Based on international standards and studies, most of the harms and risks to both the mother and the infant can be detected, treated, and prevented through proper pregnancy monitoring, as well as through appropriate and timely diagnosis. In this paper, we present the analysis, design, development, and usability assessment of a telemonitoring system focused on the remote monitoring and control of pregnancy in women suffering from hypertension, diabetes, or high-risk pregnancy. Our system is composed of two mobile web applications. One of these is designed for the medical area, allowing remote monitoring of the patient’s pregnancy, and the other one is directed towards the patient, who enters the alarm symptom data, hypertension data, diabetes data, and clinical analyses, allowing the detection of a risk situation on time. Furthermore, we performed a usability assessment of our system based on a laboratory study with seven doctors and seven patients to evaluate the users’ satisfaction. Our telemonitoring system shows a satisfactory/favorable opinion from the users’ perspectives based on the obtained results.

The learning customization and monitoring are considered key aspects of the teaching-learning processes. Some works have proposed mobile learning systems that provide teachers and students learning monitoring and personalization services. One of the main requirements of these kinds of systems in terms of software quality is usability; however, few works have addressed the usability issues using laboratory studies with users in real domains. In this work, we present a usability evaluation of the learning monitoring and personalization services of a mobile learning platform based on a laboratory study in which nine teachers and ten students participated. In our usability evaluation, the aspects evaluated were effectiveness, efficiency, and level of user satisfaction as proposed by the ISO/IEC 25000 family of standards. The results show that the teachers presented effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction considered satisfactory, while the students presented effectiveness and satisfaction classified as satisfactory and acceptable efficiency. The usability evaluation described in this work can serve as a reference for developers seeking to improve learning monitoring and personalization services development.