Andreas Papasalouros

Collaborative learning entails the involvement and the cooperation of a group of persons with the purpose of learning. Collaborative learning scripts aim to orchestrate the complex interaction among group members while Computer Supported Collaborative Learning scripts (CSCL scripts) is the research field in which IT techniques are involved in the management of the aspects of such an interaction. This article presents assessment-related aspects of an existing CSCL script authoring and deployment platform called COSTLyP. Assessment, nowadays, is considered as a vital constituent of CSCL scripts since it may affect some of their necessary components and mechanisms. The outcome of the implementation of an assessment plan may determine what should be the next step in a collaboration activity or what actions should be undertaken to bridge the gap between the expected results and the achieved level of knowledge or expertise. At the same time, assessment can also verify the regulation level that is required within each group; consequently, these scripts should be flexibly designed in order to adapt their evolution to the real needs of the participants.

Education changes, and pupils and students require a more active role. Educational competitions could be an answer. This paper highlights the key points as these were revealed through setting up an event of an educational robotic competition from zero. It, also, presents statistics collected in different periods: before the competition, directly after it, and finally at a notable time after the competition (about 6 months). To collect the data, the completion of four different questionnaires, for every annual event, was asked separately, by the participants and the organizers. The paper provides empirical insights on setting up an educational competition. It also outlines the characteristics of the students taking part and underlines the results that the contents have on them. It suggests that teamwork and collaboration within the team is a prerequisite for a competition to have an impact on the educational process. Furthermore, robotic competitions raise the interest of students in robotics, programming, and STEM, while they develop social skills and create bonds between the participants. Moreover, it is a useful tool for educators.

Using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology in learning environments is one of the latest challenges for educators and education policymakers. Conversational AI brings new possibilities for alternative and innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools, such as AI chatbots. This paper reports on field experiments with an AI chatbot and provides insights into its contribution to Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). More specifically, this paper presents an experimental use case of an educational AI chatbot called AsasaraBot, designed to teach high school students cultural content in a foreign language, i.e., English or French. The content is related to the Minoan Civilization, emphasizing the characteristic figurine of the Minoan Snake Goddess. The related chatbot-based educational program has been evaluated at public and private language schools in Greece. The findings from these experiments show that the use of AI chatbot technology for interactive ICT-based learning is suitable for learning foreign languages and cultural content at the same time. The AsasaraBot AI chatbot has been designed and implemented in the context of a postgraduate project using open-source and free software.

In this paper, we present a framework that aims to support the active participation and collaboration of knowledge workers and engineers in the co-authoring of place-based, cross-cultural and media-rich memories, experiences, stories and narration. To achieve this, the framework proposes a novel approach for facilitating such a participation and collaboration through the semantic integration of data/information and integrated tools that will be both accessible via an open, user-friendly, mobile and knowledge-based platform, emphasizing a low-effort participative and guided co-authoring approach. The presented collaborative and participative approach is expected to foster social cohesion in heterogeneous communities of interest and practice. For the realization of the framework, we propose the implementation of a proof-of-concept system and its evaluation in the socio-cultural group of immigrants and refugees within the context of creating and sharing knowledge related to the physical and digital artifacts of a modern art museum. Our vision for the proposed framework is to introduce new technology for the collaborative authoring of cultural experiences with low effort using an intelligent assistant. Additionally, we envision a Shared Experiences Ecosystem (SEE) that aims to provide media-rich content and tools that will eventually foster the inclusive access of heterogeneous socio-cultural groups to shared experiences, increasing social cohesion in resilient local environments.

The TeX/LaTeX typesetting system is the most wide-spread system for creating documents in Mathematics and Science. However, no reliable tool exists to this day for automatically transcribing documents from the above formats into Braille/Nemeth code. Thus, visually impaired students of related fields do not have access to the bulk of study material available in LaTeX format. We have developed a tool, named latex2nemeth, for directly transcribing LaTeX documents to Nemeth Braille, thus facilitating the access of blind students to Science. In order to support the extensive set of Mathematics symbols covered by TeX, we propose some new symbols based on the extension mechanisms of the Nemeth code.

The aim of this article is to present an approach for generating tests in an automatic way. Although other methods have been already reported in the literature, the proposed approach is based on ontologies, representing both domain and multimedia knowledge. The article also reports on a prototype implementation of this approach, which automatically creates tests using the Semantic Web standard technology OWL (Ontology Web Language) as well as proper annotations of images. The proposed approach is independent of specific domain characteristics, since question items are generated according to generic ontology-based strategies. In the presented prototype implementation, simple natural language generation techniques are used to project the items in the tests.