Experiencing Edublocks: A Project to Help Students in Higher Education to Select their Own Learning Paths

Abstract

In this contribution, we want to share the experiences we had in a project that aimed at helping students select their own learning paths. Learning paths were a specific sequence of edublocks (learning activities) first-year students at the University of Barcelona could choose in a course: "Uses, possibilities and limits of information and communication technologies in social education". Students were provided with a technology-based network of learning communities of peers, teams of teachers and tutors and a large set of learning edublocks. At the center of the network we placed an App that allowed teachers and tutors to give very differentiated quantitative and qualitative feedback to their students, which turned out to be of great value for students who were confronted with the task of organizing their learning paths during their first semester. Results showed that students were very satisfied with the feedback they received while at the same time, teachers indicated that using the App did not place an additional burden on them. The strategy of individualization of learning with synchronous and asynchronous human support, managed through technological tools, encourages self-regulated learning. We start our contribution with an overview of different approaches to controlling learning paths, present some theoretical considerations concerning our Edublocks project, describe the project in detail and then offer and discuss results and our insights. 2 Lindín et al.

Validation of a Model for the Formalization of Personal Learning Pathways Through Expert Judgment

“…In addition, other important findings have been identified that are not tied to a specific representational model. These include approaches to personalize learning sequences (Li et al, 2022), co-design (Salinas et al, 2022;, differentiated feedback (Lindín et al, 2022;Raj & Renumol, 2022), and collaborative learning (Rahayu et al, 2022). These elements are considered fundamental to the design of personalized learning pathways and are frequently identified in the scientific literature.…”

Implementación de “ACDGE”: Modelo para formalizar itinerarios personales de aprendizaje en educación superior

“…Pasando a los procesos de codiseño, los hallazgos permiten identificar que el modelo ACDGE involucra a los estudiantes de manera activa y los convierte en socios participativos de su proceso de aprendizaje (Bovill, 2020), generando en ellos satisfacción, interés, control del propio aprendizaje e influencia en su desarrollo social y profesional (Lindín et al, 2022) Los hallazgos frente a los elementos relacionados con las necesidades de guía del estudiantado (claridad en la información, ritmo de trabajo, control sobre el proceso de aprendizaje, apoyo del docente, planificación), que son potenciados mediante el uso de itinerarios de aprendizaje diseñados o codiseñados con el modelo ACDGE, exhiben diferencias en las modalidades educativas, especialmente entre el formato presencial y el virtual. Estas diferencias pueden explicarse por las necesidades específicas de sistemas de apoyo y andamiaje, que puede presentar en su diseño la modalidad virtual (Gros et al, 2016).…”

“…A los anteriores, se suman algunos trabajos que logran el diseño de itinerarios personales de aprendizaje a partir de sistemas adaptativos inteligentes "algoritmos-IA" (Nabizadeh et al, 2020), implementación de Sistemas de Gestión del Aprendizaje (LMS, por sus siglas en inglés) "Moodle" (Salinas et al, 2022), realidad aumentada (Buitrago, 2020), Edublocks (Lindín et al, 2022;Rivera y Lindín, 2019) y entornos digitales (Pérez-Garcias et al, 2022).…”