SELI: Smart Ecosystem for Learning and Inclusion
Founding by: ANII ERANet17/ICT0076
Duration: December 2018- December 2020
General Coordinator: Professor Matti Tedre, University of Eastern Finland, Finland
National Responsible: Regina Motz
The three areas of focus in the SELI project are: new pedagogy and methods, new learning environments, and digital training of educators including higher education teachers, pre-service teachers, and trainers in the social service sectors. The objective of this project is to improve learning results, address the competence needs of educators, renew instruction by conducting learning analytics, and encourage lifelong learning for the benefits of disadvantaged groups in society. Innovative technologies and pedagogical methods such as blockchain, global sharing pedagogy, open access, and educational data mining will be adopted in the project to develop a state-of-the-art form of learning intervention.
Web site: https://vm2161.kaj.pouta.csc.fi/
PRAXIS 2: Redesign of teacher training with digital technologies (DT)
Founding by: ANII FSED_3_2018_1_150973
Duration: March 2019-March 2020
Responsible (Udelar): Ada Czerwonogora
PRAXIS 2 deepened the work developed in Project PRAXIS. The focus of study was centered in the conformation of communities of teacher trainers from the Regional Centre of Teachers from the Centre (CeRP) to answer questions about the needs that teacher trainers had when designing their classes and guiding their students to include Digital Technologies (DT) in a didactic sense, the characteristics the training action plan should consider maximizing the potential of DT practices for higher education teachers and the strategies that would it be desirable to implement in the learning community in order to extend its influence to other communities. The community work developed with an open educational practices (OEP) perspective was the catalyst to promote exchanges among its members that allowed deepening reflection and elaboration of more complex views on their DT inclusion requirements. The training course was designed and implemented tailored for the members of the community. Its development allowed the participants to elaborate and implement, in their classrooms, authentic intervention proposals towards transformation, expressed as micro-innovations in their practices. The greatest wealth of this project was to ensure that the community constituted a space for constant reflection-action on the pedagogical and didactic use of DTs, in a setting of OEP and collaborative work throughout the process. All written community exchanges are available in the open course: PRAXIS Community 2 (2019), http://moodletd.cfe.edu.uy/course/view.php?id=4
DIGITAL AND ACCESSIBLE LIBRARY: Digitization of libraries for the compliance of the Marrakesh Treaty
Founding by: ANII ININ_1_2017_1_137280 (Inclusive Innovation – Modality I – 2017)
Duration: March 2018- March 2019
Responsible: Virginia Rodés
The project Digital Accessible Library (in Spanish Biblioteca Digital Y Accesible, BIDYA), presented by REAA Group, National Association of Blind People of Uruguay (Unión Nacional de Ciegos del Uruguay, UNCU) and Program FRIDA, was one of the ten most innovative projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, financed in 2016. In that innovation project, the objective was to generate an accessible repository of educational resources for the blind or the visually impaired. As a result, more than 500 textbooks and resources for elementary and secondary education were digitized, corrected and made available. Results of this project were tested, improved and approved by a group of blind and visually impaired people. BIDYA 2, a second related project, aimed at widening both the impact and reach of this digital library, taking the project to a University context, digitizing resources that were necessary in programs which blind students were attending. Results are listed as follows: impact reached the whole National Education System, methodological guidelines for accessible digitization were written, the federation of other libraries and quality standards based on users were achieved, literacy development processes with blind or visually impaired users were carried out, adoption strategies were developed by a variety of university communities to integrate digital accessible libraries, adoption strategies in national and foreign libraries under the Marrakesh treaty were promoted.
Web site: http://www.bibliotecaaccesible.ei.udelar.edu.uy/
DIIA: Discovery of interactions that impact Learning – Creation of a software environment to discover semantic patterns of interaction
Founding by: ANII FSED 2_ 2016_ 1_ 130712
Duration: March 2017- December 2018
Responsible: Regina Motz
The Ceibal Plan provides educational support services, using information technologies, to all students in public education, at primary and secondary level in Uruguay. It emphasizes the use of two platforms: CREA2 (Learning Management System offered by Schoology) and PAM (Adaptive Platform for Mathematics offered by Bettermarks), reporting CREA 2 in May 2015, a daily activity of 85,000 users per hour and PAM a daily activity of 95,000 active users per day in 2014. Data generated by those platforms offer an excellent opportunity to apply learning analytics based on social learning environments provided by them. The proposal offered by the DIIA project is to discover patterns of interaction that occur in social settings, analyzing student-materials interactions as well as student-student and student-teachers interactions, focusing on relevant patterns that impact on learning. The patterns are critical information for decision-making at the level of institutional planning and for detecting students at risk. They are also an input that supports teachers in making strategic decisions for improving the academic performance of students. The DIIA proposal strengthens the use of those data providing an environment for the integrated use of the tools of “Social Learning Analytics.” This proposal provides state of the art on the theme “Social Learning Analytics”, investigating pattern detection algorithms with approaches that consider the semantic nature of social interactions and the participation of students in various multiplatforms contexts.
Prediction models for determining academic risk
Founding by: ANII
Duration: December 2016 – December 2019
Responsible: Virginia Rodés
This project promotes the creation of an early warning system for academic risk in public primary and secondary education students in Uruguay. This system will use a large amount of data collected from the interaction of students with the various technological platforms that they use within the Ceibal Plan and ANEP digital initiatives. Using prediction models based on educational data mining techniques, this early warning system will allow teachers or pedagogical support professionals to identify and help those students who are at risk of leaving the educational system, in order to carry out the necessary interventions to mitigate this risk and better understand the nature of the factors that affect the continuance of students in the educational system.
AREA: Better use of Ceibal Repository of Open Educational Resources for Teachers Network
Founding by: ANII FSED_2_2015_1_120842
Duration: March 2016- December 2016
Responsible: Regina Motz
The “AREA” project (“Better use of Ceibal Repository for Open Educational Resources Teachers Network”) proposes a workspace where teachers interact with the Repository of Open Educational Resources (OER). In this first stage the work area will offer an interactive wizard to license OER, and peer review mechanisms of the OER. Proper licensing is critical to the quality of the repository. The evaluation of OER by faculty peers is valuable information for measuring their quality. Both learning and design innovations mostly take place in communities. The Ceibal Plan has both a repository of educational resources and a strong network of teachers who use them; nevertheless, the use of information systems that relate them, has not been adopted within these contexts. It is therefore essential to develop and implement information systems that play an active role within the community and social network for teachers of Ceibal Plan.The development of these tools is posed as a challenge from the technological point of view. They are tools that integrate semantic aspects of licensing with the social aspects of Web 2.0, which in English have been called “semantic web” and “crowdsourcing” or knowledge of masses.
REMAR: MERCOSUR Network for accessibility and the collaborative generation of open educational resources
Founding by: Programa de Apoyo al Sector Educativo del MERCOSUR (PASEM)” Convenio de Financiación DCI – ALA/2010/19892
Reference: EuropeAid/134-602/M/ACT/R06
Duration: January 2014 – December 2015
General Coordinator: Alicia Díaz, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina.
National Responsible: Regina Motz
The Mercosur network for accessibility and collaborative generation of open educational resources (REMAR) proposes the integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), with special emphasis on Web 3.0 tools and the development of activities for teacher training and development towards a more effective use and collaborative elaboration of Open and Accessible Educational Resources (OAER). The main objective of the project is to provide teachers who are interested in OAER, a virtual environment to communicate, share experiences and make educational resources available and accessible to the community.
Web site: https://proyectoremar.wordpress.com/
Ibero-American Network for the usability of educational repositories (RIURE)
Founding by: CYTED
Duration: April 2013-April 2016
General Coordinator: Martín Llamas Nistal, Universidad de Vigo, España.
National Responsible: Virginia Rodés
The Ibero-American Network for the usability of educational repositories aims to improve the usability of Educational Repositories, allowing more intuitive and simple searches. Among its main objectives are the introduction of pedagogical aspects in the repositories of educational material, the research and development of a set of relevant and quality metrics, based on the intrinsic and extrinsic information of educational materials. It also attempts to introduce recommendation systems based on the user profile, material, and context, which may be integrated to the main learning environments that are used today.
ESVIAL – Inclusive Virtual Higher Education – Latin America.
Founding by: EU ALFA III
Duration: January 2012 – January 2015
General Coordinator: José Hilera, Universidad de Alcalá, España.
National Responsible: Regina Motz
ESVIAL aimed at improving virtual higher education accessibility, by creating and implementing methodologies that establish a working model for the achievement of accessibility requirements and standards in the context of virtual education. It considered study plans that had been developed based on social needs, sustainability needs, and employability of physically disadvantaged people in Latin American participants, integrated into the Common Space of Higher Education, ALCUE. Results were: the design of a methodological guide for the implementation of virtual curricular developments in accessible virtual campuses, the generation of virtual accessible curricula and the adaptation of virtual campuses to ensure accessibility.
Web site: http://www.esvial.org/
LATIn: Latin American Open Textbooks Initiative
Founding by: DCI-ALA/19.09.01/11/21526/279- 155/ALFA III(2011)-52
Duration: January 2012 – January 2015
General Coordinator: Xavier Ochoa, Escuela Politécnica del Litoral , Ecuador
National Responsible: Regina Motz
This project dealt with the problem of high costs of textbooks for higher education in Latin America. Its main actions were the creation and dissemination of collaboration initiatives for the development of Open Textbooks for Higher Education designed specifically for the region. This initiative will foster and support teachers and authors so that they contribute with sections and chapters that could be bound together in personalized books for the whole community. Books created are available for free for students in an electronic format or they can be legally printed at a low cost since there is no distribution cost or licence to be paid for. This solution has contributed to the creation of personalized books, where each teacher is able to select the appropriate sections for his or her courses or freely adapt the existing sections to his or her needs. Also, local teachers have been the source of knowledge, contextualized in the system of Higher Education of Latin America. Both academic authors and teachers are the principal users of the proposed solution; however, low-income students have been the main beneficiaries of the open, freely available textbooks produced. Textbooks created have been freely available to use, reuse, translate, adapt and remix.