Author: Josep Prieto Blázquez
Programme: Doctoral Programme on the Information and Knowledge Society
Language: Catalan
Supervisor: Dr Mario Pérez-Montoro Gutiérrez
Faculty / Institute: Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3)
Subjects: Computer Science, Higher Education, Universities
Key words: e-laboratory, Distance learning, Practical laboratory activities, Teaching engineering in computer science, Ontologies, Learning platform
Area of knowledge: Computer Languages and Systems
+ Link to project
Summary
During the past decade, a huge growth has been observed in the number of universities that need to diffuse knowledge and extend lifelong learning opportunities to students through distance learning environments The rapid and continuous developments in information and communication technologies, together with cultural changes, have increased the consciousness and the demand for distance learning, allowing students to access their courses anytime and anywhere. In this new distance learning scenario, it is necessary to perform practical activities in a virtual way, in order to acquire the competences that determine the technical degrees. The accomplishment of these practices requires special learning-teaching techniques and, therefore, it is necessary to look for technological and pedagogical alternatives to the present ones that allow a break from the traditional need for time and space synchronism. For that reason, new virtual spaces are required in a virtual university, so practical activities can be carried out. Such spaces are called virtual laboratories.
Virtual laboratories are the main focus of this dissertation which aims to put at the disposal of the educational community a system capable of creating a virtual classroom to carry out practical activities in a virtual learning environment, focusing on computer engineering education.
Specifically, this dissertation presents the development process which was performed to manage the creation of virtual Laboratories. This process essentially consisted in designing, in the first place, the structure and characterization of the virtual laboratories; the next step was to make the formal specification based on ontologies; and finally to create them on a real learning platform.
The use of ontologies is especially useful in this dissertation since it provides an explicit meaning to information, permitting it to be shared and processed automatically, as well as defining a new scenario to represent the information in specific fields of engineering. That is to say, it is the case for the semantic specification of virtual laboratories.