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The application of methodological innovations in the teaching of engineering has been promoted and justified for several years now, especially those based on active learning and problem-based learning. However, the adoption of these new methodologies by universities has been slower than expected. Although many of the indicated causes refer to resistance by professors (e.g. a lack of time for implementation), there are also those that are based on resistance by students. In particular, an attitude of distrust is mentioned with regard to these innovations, which normally require greater student participation. However, if the student has been part of passive learning during the majority of his life, how valid is his opinion about a methodology that he does not know?In order to analyze this, we performed a two-stage study on the perception about learning methodologies on university students in Universidad de los Andes, Chile. The first stage consisted in changing a course to the active learning methodology and surveying the course's students (N=56) at the beginning as well as the end of the course, asking them to describe their ideal class. The results showed that the attribute "participative", which is key in an active learning methodology, went from a selection of 41% before the course to 68% after the course was finished. The second stage corresponded to a general perception study of the engineering students at the same university, which was performed two years after starting to take 3 of the major's courses with methodological innovations based on active learning. The study included 581 students (62% of the total students at the School), who were asked to describe their ideal class. We compared the results of the opinions of freshmen (N=198) with upperclassmen that had taken courses with active learning (N=210) and those who had not (N=173). This study showed different cases where the description of the ideal class was the consequence of the previous courses that the student had taken, such as the example previously shown about how the attribute "participative" was chosen significantly more by upperclassmen than by freshmen, which coincides with the passive methodologies proper to the country's schools where they had studied. In this way, in this paper we show through diverse situations the influence that experienced methodologies can have on a student, and how through these same methodologies we can change these opinions and make them favorable towards methodologies based on active learning.

Keeping students engaged can improve their learning. Gamification is a technique that has been shown to improve engagement, transferring the positive effects of videogames. However, the mobile games industry has identified that player retention decreases quickly over time, but it is unclear if this decreasing retention pattern transfers to gamification activities. To check if the behavioral engagement was stable over a 14‐week engineering course, we gamified an existing virtual learning environment (VLE), conducting an observational study for two semesters. Actions performed by students within the VLE were used to measure behavioral engagement, which allows us to track student behavior weekly. To analyze the gamification effect, we divided user actions into two groups: academic and gamified. The results showed that the gamified actions performed by students in the VLE decreased every week, which was significantly higher than the decrease in academic actions. This shows that the decreasing retention pattern seen in mobile games was also present in this study. These results suggest that, just like in mobile games, to sustain the behavioral engagement over a long period of time in a gamified class, additional modern game‐design techniques should be considered.

With many daily tasks now performed on the Internet, productivity and efficiency in working with web pages have become transversal necessities for all users. Many of these tasks involve the inputting of user information, obligating the user to interact with a webform. Research has demonstrated that productivity depends largely on users' personal characteristics, implying that it will vary from user to user. The webform development process must therefore, include modeling of its intended users to ensure the interface design is appropriate. Taking all potential users into account is difficult, however, primarily because their identity is unknown, and some may be effectively excluded by the final design. Such discrimination can be avoided by incorporating rules that allow webforms to adapt automatically to the individual user's characteristics, the principal one being the person's culture. In this paper we report two studies that validate this option. We begin by determining the relationships between a user's cultural dimension scores and their behavior when faced with a webform. We then validate the notion that rules based on these relationships can be established for the automatic adaptation of a webform in order to reduce the time taken to complete it. We conclude that the automatic webform adaptation to the cultural dimensions of users improves their performance.

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The Internet has created different expectations regarding its possibilities as a tool for including groups that have heretofore been excluded from the modern world. But mere access to information does not necessarily imply correct and effective use of it. Despite the great increase in Internet access in previously excluded areas, expectations of inclusion have not been fulfilled. Research suggests that the effectiveness of Internet use varies among cultures, but all such studies analyze countries as a whole with no further breakdown. Yet it is known that within a given country there co-exist subcultures that differ both in language and social context. This paper presents a study that shows the correlation between different social subcultures and their Internet knowledge.

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