PhD dissertation by Elena Rodriguez

Last week IE PhD student and UOC assistant professor Elena Rodriguez received her PhD degree in the University of Alcalá. Elena presented her many years of research -supervisd by IE member Miguel Angel Sicilia and UOC member Jordi Conesa- in a dissertation titled “Enriching metadata by providing semantics with commonsense ontologies”. The ceremony took place in the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Alcalá where a committee of experts chaired by Angelica de Antonio from the Polytechnic University of Madrid evaluated the dissertation.

Examination board and supervisors posing in the patio of the Faculty of Philosophy with the new PhD Elena Rodriguez (in the center of the picture wearing a white blazer)

 

PhD dissertation: Leonardo Lezcano

Last Monday IE member Leonardo Lezcano received his PhD degree, awarded cum laude by the University of Alcalá, after defending his four year research in a dissertation titled “COMBINING ONTOLOGIES AND RULES WITH CLINICAL ARCHETYPES”. The ceremony took place in the Faculty of Law of the University of Alcalá where a committee of experts chaired by Pythagoras Karampiperis evaluated the dissertation. From now on Lezcano will continue to develop his research lines, which are related to the Semantic Web as well as to Semantic Interoperability issues, Linked Data, Network Analysis and Knowledge Representation.

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Successful PhD dissertation to close the year

Friday 20th of december, IE doctorate student Alejandra Segura presented her thesis defense in the Rectorate building of the University of Alcala. This research work, supervised by IE member Salvador Sanchez and Manuel E. Prieto from the University of Castilla la Mancha, aimed to propose a strategy for query expansion based on domain ontologies. According to this work, it is possible to find an strategy allowing instructional designers to find objects in a repository relevant enough as to be reused in the design of new courses or in the composition of new, more complex resources. To achieve this goal, proposals of query expansions both in the field of information retrieval in general or specifically on learning object repositories were analyzed.

For the purpose of evaluation, an experiment in the area of genetics was designed. This experiment used the Gene Ontology as a knowledge base and the MERLOT repository as a provider of learning objects in this domain. In the picture above these lines, Alejandra during her presentation in front of the evaluation board (left).

 

Evaluating learning objects quality in MMOL environments

In the framework of a new pHd on the impact of Massively Multiuser Online Learning environments (MMOL) in virtual courses, IE member Salvador Sanchez participates in a pioneering experience on the evaluation of learning objects quality in one of these environments.

Agenda of the session

Run by the pHd candidate Carlos M. Lorenzo, the session uses the collaborative LORI approach, where a group of users contribute their individual evaluations on a learning object and try to reach a consensus after hearing everyone else’s opinion. A first step focuses on each individual evaluations, where each participant briefly presents his / her validation. Later, points where major disagreement exist are studied with the help of a moderator who tries to guide participants to reach an agreement (but not forcing them to change their initial perceptions if they don’t want to).

Getting familiar with others' preliminary evaluations

During the negotiation phase, a shared Google docs spreadsheet is used by the moderator to integrate the validations and to modify them according to the changes suggested after the discussions run.

Integrating individual evaluations in a google spreadsheet in the MMOL environment

Preliminary results in other topics of our master degree will be published soon, as we think these technologies really look promising on bringing motivation to online courses compared to traditional LMSs.

 

Javier Sanz Ph.D dissertation

Last monday IE members Miguel Angel Sicilia and Salvador Sanchez attended to the Ph.D dissertation of Javier Sanz. Javier’s work on learning object metrics, supervised by Salvador and Juan Manuel Dodero from University of Cadiz, has been positively acclaimed by the community: this was just the last hurdle to overcome.

Professors from University of Alcala, other universities in Spain (Cadiz, Carlos III of Madrid) and Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (Guayaquil, Ecuador) formed the board of assessors for the dissertation.

After the successful event, supervisors, assessors and the new Ph.D had lunch together in the restaurant inside El Parador of Alcala.

 

Ph.D. work at Rafina

Miguel-Angel is spending some days at Athens to attend a couple of events. He is staying at Avra Hotel in Athen’s port Rafina. This saturday he met Maria Pavlis-Korres to have a session of hard work on her Ph.D. Maria is enrolled at the Ph.D. program of the University of Alcalá, and she is working on teaching educators of special groups (more concretely, gypsies). This is a really interesting topic in the middle of andragogy and technology.

In the picture below, Miguel-Angel and Maria are reviewing the methodology and educational resources devised so far.

Miguel-Angel and Maria at Rafina, Athens

 

Erla Morales Ph.D dissertation – Salamanca University

I (Miguel-Angel) formed part of the committee evaluating the Ph.D. dissertation of Erla Morales (April 24th 2008), about pedagogy, quality and learning objects. You can get an idea of the work presented by reading this paper (coauthored with her two Ph.D. supervisors):

http://www.jucs.org/jucs_13_7/improving_lo_quality_through

It was a really good dissertation and I enjoyed discussing on issues as reusability, context and quality of leaning resources and metadata. After the dissertation we had a really nice dinner at restaurant La Hoja.

 

Since the dissertation was friday at 18. 30, I went with my wife and two kids to Salamanca. Saturday morning I was with Miguel-Angel (my son) visting the rests of the Church of San Cebrián, known as the “Cueva de Salamanca” which is surrounded by legends and mysteries. It is said that the devil was something like a “professor” of black arts at that cave, contrasting his with the teachings of the University. The place gives you an extrange feeling, if you have the opportunity go and visit it, especially in the night!