Framing automatic grading techniques for open-ended questionnaires responses. A short survey
The assessment of students' performances is one of the essential components of teaching activities, and it poses different challenges to teachers and instructors, especially when considering the grading of responses to open-ended questions (i.e., short-answers or essays). Open-ended tasks allow a more in-depth assessment of students' learning levels, but their evaluation and grading are time-consuming and prone to subjective bias. For these reasons, automatic grading techniques have been studied for a long time, focusing mainly on short-answers rather than long essays. Given the growing popularity of Massive Online Open Courses and the shifting from physical to virtual classrooms environmen…
Facilitating Access to Health Web Pages with Different Language Complexity Levels
The number of people looking for health information on the Internet is constantly growing. When searching for health information, different types of users, such as patients, clinicians or medical researchers, have different needs and should easily find the information they are looking for based on their specific requirements. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and, often, overload them with the provided amount of information. On the other hand, specific search engines mostly work on medical literature and specialized web sites are often not free and contain focused information built by hand. This paper presents a method to facilitate the search of he…
Integrating xAPI in AR applications for Positive Behaviour Intervention and Support
The spread of new technologies like Augmented Reality and recent technological developments, provide innovative techniques and tools that show increasing potential in education. In this paper we will showcase the work implemented within the Horizon 2020 European project ARETE (Augmented Reality Interactive Educational System). One of the pilots of this project aims to investigate for the first time the introduction of AR to support a behavioral lesson in schools where Positive Behaviour Intervention and Support (PBIS) methodology is adopted. In particular, we present the study conducted to track user interactions with augmented reality objects through the use of the Experience API standard.
A Framework for Opening Data and Creating Advanced Services in the Health and Social Fields
Open data is publicly available data that can be universally and readily accessed, used, and redistributed. Open data holds particular potential in the health and social sectors but, presently, health and social data are often published in a ‘closed’ format.There are different tools that allow to ‘open’ data, clean, structure and process them in order to elaborate them and build advanced services but, unfortunately, there is no single tool that can be used to perform all different tasks. We believe that the availability of Open Data in the health and social fields should be greatly increased and a way for creating new health and social services should be provided. In this paper, we present …
Language complexity in on-line health information retrieval
The number of people searching for on-line health information has been steadily growing over the years so it is crucial to understand their specific requirements in order to help them finding easily and quickly the specific in-formation they are looking for. Although generic search engines are typically used by health information seekers as the starting point for searching information, they have been shown to be limited and unsatisfactory because they make generic searches, often overloading the user with the provided amount of results. Moreover, they are not able to provide specific information to different types of users. At the same time, specific search engines mostly work on medical li…
Iconic framework for cooperative coding
The description of an innovative framework built on top of Web-based visual programming environment is the primary aim of this contribution. In the last decade, many frameworks oriented to visual languages have been introduced in literature to improve the skill on programming languages, but at the best of our knowledge, no framework has been specially designed to support collaborative work on heterogeneous distributed environments. Therefore, SIRENE introduces a new framework in which beginners and experts can cooperate to develop algorithms by using a visual and iconic paradigm. Students, in the classroom or connected from everywhere, can be involved into the definition of the algorithm, c…
Provision of tailored health information for patient empowerment: An initial study
Search of "right" health information by patients/citizens is an important step towards their empowerment. The number of health information seekers on the Internet is steadily increasing over the years so it is crucial to understand their information needs and the challenges they face during the search process. However, generic search engines do not make any distinction among the users and overload them with the amount of information. Moreover, specific search engines/sites mostly work on medical literature and are built by hand. This paper analyses the possibility of providing the user with tailored web information by exploiting the web semantic capabilities and, in particular, those of sch…
A DIGITAL BEHAVIOURAL ASSESSMENT APPLICATION TO APPLY POSITIVE BEHAVIOUR SUPPORT IN SCHOOL WIDE INTERVENTION
The Behavioural Assessment to improve School Environment (BASE) European Erasmus+ project responses to the European requirement of reforming the whole scholastic disciplinary system identifies in the proven US-born concept of the Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) one possible solution, and tries to adapt its practical and evidence-based principles to the heterogeneous European school settings. Recently, scientific studies (Sugai, Horner, 2016) have emphasized the promising role of PBS in reducing the occurrence of behavioural problems by setting up a preventive, proactive and multilevel system based on the direct involvement of the entire school team: starting from teachers, school leaders u…
A Prototype of Wireless Sensor for Data Acquisition in Energy Management Systems
A prototype of a wireless sensor for monitoring electrical loads in a smart building is designed and implemented. The sensor can acquire the main electrical parameters of the connected load and, optionally, other physical quantities (e.g., room temperature). Unlike other wireless sensors in literature, the proposed sensor is cheap and small, exploits the Wi-Fi network that is commonly available inside buildings, and uses a lightweight message-based communication paradigm. Besides the sensor node, two management nodes are also implemented to manage sensor reconfiguration and the persistence of data. The measured data are stored in an SQLite database and can be used for various purposes, e.g.…
ULearn: Personalized Medical Learning on the Web for Patient Empowerment
Abstract. Health literacy constitutes an important step towards patient empowerment and the Web is presently the biggest repository of medical information and, thus, the biggest medical resource to be used in the learning process. However, at present web medical information is mainly accessed through generic search engines that do not take into account the user specific needs and starting knowledge and so are not able to support learning activities tailored to the specific user requirements. This work presents “ULearn” a meta engine that supports access, understanding and learning on the Web in the medical domain based on specific user requirements and knowledge levels towards what we call …
On-Line Retrieval of Health Information Based on Language Complexity, Information Customization and Information Quality
Abstract. A patient, nowadays, acquires on-line health information mainly by means of a search engine. Generic search engines have been shown to be limited and unsatisfactory, at times, because of their generic searches that overload users with the amount of results. Moreover, they are not able to provide customized information to different types of users. At the same time, specific search engines mostly work on medical literature and provide extracts from medical journals that are mainly useful for medical researchers and experts. As a consequence, the found health information may or may not help a user (mainly a non-expert one) for a full comprehension of what he/she is looking for (e.g.,…
Supporting Learning Activities in the Health Sector through Open Data
The growing availability of Open Data for educational purposes is playing a key role in shaping and influencing the development of the learning processes. At the same time, Open Data have a particular potential in the health sector so that the major healthcare organizations, universities, colleges, and medical schools are in the process of creating high quality 'Open' education & training resources and tools. However, in this growing world of open health resources for educational purposes, the task of finding the right material can become very difficult mainly when using a general purpose search engine like google. Thus, to overcome this problem and facilitate the search and learning ac…
Exploring learning analytics on YouTube: a tool to support students interactions analysis
YouTube is a free online video-sharing platform that is often used by students for their learning activities. The interactions of the students when using the platform to shape new concepts, are worth to be investigated to better understand and to optimize the learning opportunities that take place in this platform. In this paper, we investigate which types of data are relevant to analyse the interactions of students with content on YouTube, and we introduce a new tool that emulates students’ interactions with the platform in order to provide data to be used in supporting Learning Analytics approaches. Our preliminary study inspects the tool effectiveness in data collection and analyses the …
LOD.CS.UNIPA Project: an experience of LOD at the University of Palermo
This paper describes the LOD.CS.UNI.PA Project and its main goal, the transformation process of data already available on the web site of the Computer Science curricula web site at the University of Palermo into data ready to be connected to the LOD. Since 1997 information about bachelor and master degrees in Computer Science at the University of Palermo has been published on the web, and provides a reference point for students, teachers and researchers who have easy access to the information they require. However, the users of the web are now changing; data cannot be published only for human comprehension but intelligent devices also need access to web data and above all they need to under…
A visual framework to support collaborative coding activities
In this paper, we present a framework named SIRENE, a Web-based visual programming environment, where teachers and students can collaboratively interact, using a flexible and versatile definition of visual programming code instead of pre-established rules. After the description of the architecture of the SIRENE framework, the preliminary results of a pilot trial with secondary school students will be presented; these results will lead to the final remarks and directions for further developments.
Development and Practical Use of a Medical Vocabulary-Thesaurus-Dictionary for Patient Empowerment
Health empowerment can be obtained through an informative and educational intervention to increase one's ability to think critically and act autonomously. Medical texts are usually written by professionals and can be difficulty understood by non experts who do not have the same skills and vocabularies. Thus, it would be desirable to have an online medical vocabulary-thesaurus-dictionary that can help a non expert to easily find the consumer equivalent of medical (technical) terms and additional consumer information. To this end, we have developed an online multilingual medical vocabulary-thesaurus-dictionary by interconnecting different online sources, i.e., medical vocabularies to create a…
Tailored retrieval of health information from the web for facilitating communication and empowerment of elderly people
A patient, nowadays, acquires health information from the Web mainly through a “human-to-machine” communication process with a generic search engine. This, in turn, affects, positively or negatively, his/her empowerment level and the “human-to-human” communication process that occurs between a patient and a healthcare professional such as a doctor. A generic communication process can be modelled by considering its syntactic-technical, semantic-meaning, and pragmatic-effectiveness levels and an efficacious communication occurs when all the communication levels are fully addressed. In the case of retrieval of health information from the Web, although a generic search engine is able to work at…
Introducing evidence-based practices to manage problem behaviours at school: The behave application
In the last years, an increasing awareness amongst educator and scholastic psychologists of the relevance to manage behavioural and emotional problems applying evidence-based approaches, and quasi-experimental designs is emerging. This request, however, must come to terms with certain barriers that persist in the school environment. The introduction of quantified methods to assess and monitor student's results, to evaluate the efficacy of the intervention, to understand the evolution of the single, is not part of the usual teacher's curriculum. The present paper describes the BEHAVE (Behavioral management model across Europe) application, a tool able to support the transition of all educato…
Enriching Didactic Similarity Measures of Concept Maps by a Deep Learning Based Approach
Concept maps are significant tools able to support several tasks in the educational area such as curriculum design, knowledge organization and modeling, students' assessment and many others. They are also successfully used in learning activities in which students have to represent domain knowledge according to teacher's assignment. In this context, the development of Learning Analytics approaches would benefit of methods that automatically compare concept maps. Detecting concept maps similarities is relevant to identify how the same concepts are used in different knowledge representations. Algorithms for comparing graphs have been extensively studied in the literature, but they do not appea…
Intelligent Knowledge Understanding from Students Questionnaires: A Case Study
Learning Analytics techniques are widely used to improve students’ performance. Data collected from students’ assessments are helpful to predict their success and questionnaires are extensively adopted to assess students’ knowledge. Several mathematical models studying the correlation between students’ hidden skills and their performance to questionnaires’ items have been introduced. Among them, Non-negative matrix factorizations (NMFs) have been proven to be effective in automatically extracting hidden skills, a time-consuming activity that is usually tackled manually prone to subjective interpretations. In this paper, we present an intelligent data analysis approach based upon NMF. Data a…
Improving Communication in Risk Management of Health Information Technology Systems by means of Medical Text Simplification
Health Information Technology Systems (HITS) are increasingly used to improve the quality of patient care while reducing costs. These systems have been developed in response to the changing models of care to an ongoing relationship between patient and care team, supported by the use of technology due to the increased instance of chronic disease. However, the use of HITS may increase the risk to patient safety and security. While standards can be used to address and manage these risks, significant communication problems exist between experts working in different departments. These departments operate in silos often leading to communication breakdowns. For example, risk management stakeholder…