Following please find a current list of our projects:

Affective audioplayer

Subliminal sound - Affective Sound for an engaging experience (music therapy online)

The project consists on providing students with several kinds of music tracks originally developed to improve concentration and affective states when learning. Styles include binaural beats, white sounds, environmental music, classical music…  These kind of track will be tested in order to evaluate their impact and interest of use for online learning.

More especifically, te experiment aims to:

Assess the possibilities of binaural beats and environmental sounds to enhance learning through the improvement of relaxation and concentration.

As a more specific objective, to evaluate the impact of the sounds in three cognitive processes: learning, memory and attention.

Visual Community - An online window to the community activity (geolocation meets tweeter meets panoramio)

UOC students will be provided with a tool where they will be able to show their activity on a geolocation system. Learners will have the possibility to post tweeter states, photos, videos and other resources through a visualization based on google maps like panoramio. The idea is to support the sense of belonging and the dynamism of the UOC community as well as the possibilities of geolocalisation such as sharing resources, organizing formal or informal meetings, etc.

ENJOY Guidelines 2.0

While the ENJOY 1.0 established twelve generic affective  principles to be applied in the design of virtual learning environments, the second part of the project aims to go in depth with each guideline, showing real examples and ways to apply each principle to different learning scenarios.

SimAula

SimAULA will setup a virtual practicum in the form of a three-dimensional, online world adapted for student teaching. The teacher candidates will interact with avatars, develop lesson plans, and teach in the virtual classrooms. In order to provide interesting and effective learning activities, this project will focus on the pedagogical side based on the knowledge of teachers and pedagogic and psychology experts to define the behaviour model of the virtual students and create simulations and situations that are both pedagogically and educational sound. simAULA will take advantage of serious games technology to make the learning scenario engaging and interesting for the student.  Via simulations, teachers will practice their teaching and classroom management skills within a fun and safe educational game environment. simAULA will empower universities and schools with a very innovative simulation system that will enable them to enhance the teaching abilities of their students though result-driven classroom practices.

Evaluation of the emotional reactionS through EEG parameters (EPOC Emotiv)

The EPOC brain-computer headset allows the gathering of data in three categories of inputs: conscious thoughts, emotions and facial expressions. At the moment we are testing the effectivity in the identification of facial expressions and the results are pretty interesting.

EPOC picks up signals of the facial muscles through EEG sensors. It is in this way that expressions like smiling, laughing or jaw or teeth clenching are detected by the system once it has been trained by a particular person. Detections are generally very fast (10 ms) and the degree of accuracy is quite good.

Quiz Learn

QuizLearn is an application for students to collaboratively create course quizzes that will allow personalization of the learning process and be used in multiple devices, mobile phones include. QuizLearn is to be used by students to learn, assess their knowledge and/or practice their skills in a particular subject, and via multiple devices.

Past projects

ENJOY Guidelines

The ENJOY are a set of guidelines that are necessary to design motivating and engaging e-learning environments. With the focus having been on the design of motivating and engaging elearning
tasks and processes, very little has been done to understand the impact of the e-learning
environment, known as the virtual campus, in the students’ learning experience. The project proposes a methodology that can help designers, faculty and learning designers and technologists ensure that the users’
overall experience in a virtual learning environment is both engaging and motivating and therefore contribute to the ultimate goal, to learn and be motivated to learn.

Download the ENJOY guidelines

Ten Heuristics

The Ten Emotion Heuristics are a collection of the ten most usual facial and body expressions in e-learning environments. They are based on observation and do not require extra implementation effort since most interface evaluations are conducted observing directly and recording the user as he or she interacts with the interface. In such a scenario, facial and body expressions are often observed and recorded, but generally not measured in a structured manner. The smile heuristic included in this method represents the goal of the evaluation: to see a user with relaxed neutral facials, therefore, without experiencing negative reactions or frustration (low facial muscular activity).

The Ten Emotion Heuristics had been developed by collecting data from previous studies, identifying the most common facial, oral and gestural expressions of students interacting with online environments.

Download the ten emotion heuristics

Affective assessment of the mainpage of UOC students

The aim of the study is to know in depth what kind of emotional impact has the new UOC students’ mainpage.

This mainpage has incorporated a set of new personalization functionalities and we expect that will improve the affective overall experience. In order to guarantee a strong methodology we have used three different techniques to gather data: face gestures interpretation, eyetracking and pupil size.

Download the poster of the study

Dowload a conference paper of the study

Social learning in Facebook: an experience at UOC

The experience aims to test an open learning model, understood as a virtual learning environment open to the Internet community, based on the use of open resources and on a methodology focused on the participation and collaboration of users in the construction of knowledge.

The main hypothesis is that students join the course because of personal motivation, interests and desire to learn in a collaborative experience with others. From the point of view of engagement, one of the keywords of the course, results will be presented soon.

Here you will find some resources of the project

A method test of affect tagging

To assess the validity of affect-tagging as a new method for measuring user experience, Mary Frances Jones from the Georgia Tech University and the Affective Technology Research Group conducted a survey to compare verbal self-response surveys vs. non-verbal self-response surveys. Based on a review of the literature, the hypothesis was that affect-tagging could capture more clear and meaningful data, and ultimately richer insights into the user’s overall experience with an interface.

Fluid Engage

Fluid Engage is a new project that will create an open source community to provide curators and educators within museums and galleries the necessary supports, tools and resources so that they in turn can:

1. Create engaging visitor experiences across all three exhibit environments: the computer mediated physical space, online and through mobile devices.
2. Provide accessible exhibits and experiences in these environments, thereby meeting legal commitments while at the same time making the experience
   more usable and engaging for all visitors.
3. More seamlessly and efficiently integrate existing and new applications applied in museums to create engaging visitor experiences (content
   management system, collection management systems, maps, social software, mobile applications, and beyond)
4. Bridge the gap between creative design vision and its expression in the digital realm and participate in the larger user experience design community.