Dr. Oriel Herrera Gamboa

La inteligencia artificial (IA) generativa ha introducido transformaciones significativas en la docencia universitaria, generando oportunidades para el aprendizaje personalizado, el apoyo cognitivo y la producción académica. Sin embargo, su adopción responsable sigue enfrentándose a desafíos por los persistentes riesgos éticos, las brechas de competencias y la falta de marcos pedagógicos y regulatorios consolidados. Este artículo presenta los resultados de un proyecto de innovación educativa desarrollado en la Universidad Católica de Temuco, orientado a explorar y validar usos pedagógicos de la IA mediante un enfoque interdisciplinar en las facultades de Ciencias Jurídicas, Ciencias Básicas e Ingeniería. Empleando una metodología de investigación-acción y un diseño de método mixto basado en encuestas pre y posintervención, se evidenció un aumento significativo del uso académico de herramientas de IA y una percepción positiva sobre su impacto en el aprendizaje, lo que destacó que un 68,9% del estudiantado identificó mejoras en su trayectoria formativa. No obstante, un 41,34% mantiene una valoración ética cautelosa, especialmente en contextos jurídicos. Los resultados subrayan la necesidad de superar una visión instrumental de la IA hacia enfoques centrados en el proceso de aprendizaje, el fortalecimiento de competencias transversales y la reafirmación del rol docente como mediador crítico del uso tecnológico.

The integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in higher education has seen continuous growth, offering numerous tools and platforms to enhance the learning process for both students and educators. However, the lack of pedagogical training among many teachers prevents the use of ICT from automatically guaranteeing quality education. This article introduces a collaborative platform designed to facilitate educators in creating learning modules. The platform considers three key elements when designing a module: i) assessment as the guiding axis for the design, ii) the SOLO taxonomy to guide the definition of the learning outcomes, and iii) a conversational framework to assist in designing the various tasks that students must complete. Although the platform showed positive results a few years ago, evaluation revealed several areas for improvement in terms of technical, pedagogical, and usability aspects. As a result, improvements were implemented on three levels. First, the user experience was optimized through significant enhancements in the interface and collaboration functionalities, making the platform more intuitive and accessible. Second, the pedagogical support was updated, replacing Bloom's taxonomy with the SOLO taxonomy, which provides a more comprehensive and detailed approach to assessing student understanding and learning outcomes. Finally, the technological implementation was enhanced using advanced software tools, allowing for more efficient and robust development of features. These improvements not only optimized the user experience but also provided stronger pedagogical support and more advanced technological implementation, ensuring that the platform remains a valuable and effective tool in higher education. This experience yielded satisfactory results, both in evaluating the platform's usage by educators and in assessing students' experiences when working with learning modules generated by the platform.

Chile has a high natural disaster risk index and is highly vulnerable to climate change. Because of this, it is crucial to achieve widespread community awareness of disasters, in order to enhance community resilience. To address this, a solution based on web technology to allow actors from the response system, and general users later, to visualize and contrast past and present images of an area affected by a disaster have been built and explored. The results indicate that this technology can be successfully developed to meet the functional and usability requirements of software engineering professionals, as well as experts from the Chilean disaster management agency. The main conclusion from this research effort is that this proof of concept technology has the potential to effectively enhance the risk perception of communities.

The incorporation of ICT in university teaching has been constantly growing. Hundreds of tools, platforms, apps, and other technological products are made available to students and teachers in order to improve the training process. However, there is a great weakness in teachers in relation to their pedagogical training, so the use of ICTs does not guarantee a quality training process. This article presents a collaborative platform that facilitates the design of learning modules. This platform offers a pedagogical scaffolding that tries to overcome some deficiencies in the area of instructional design. This scaffolding incorporates three elements in the conception of the design of a module: i) evaluation as the guiding axis for the design, ii) Bloom's taxonomy to guide the definition of the module's learning outcomes, and iii) the conversational framework for facilitate the design of the different tasks that the student must perform. The platform was tested by a group of teachers from different disciplines. At the end of the experience, a focus group was carried out on the participants, which yielded favorable results, which are summarized in that teachers with less experience benefit from the experience of other teachers, and the collaborative work that the same platform offers is also enhanced.

The practice of teaching to train the professionals of the future is increasingly demanding. Many of the trainers in Higher Education Institutions do not have a training in pedagogy, so they do their best to achieve good results in their students. Teachers base their methodology on repeating patterns learned, training received, formal and informal support from pedagogical support units in universities, among other elements. This article presents a platform that supports the design of pedagogical strategies, which is based on three pillars. First, planning based on pedagogical criteria (Bloom's taxonomy and conversational framework). Second, a design that arises from assessment, understood as an always formative activity. And third, collaboration both in the design of the activities and in sharing these designs with others. This platform has been used for designs in the computing area with positive evaluations from the participating teachers. Teachers from other disciplines have also joined, confirming the usefulness and transversality of the platform. A direct impact on students with more solid and relevant learning is expected.

Teaching in higher education institutions is being developed with extensive use of technology. One of its consequences is the transformation of traditional teaching practices, allowing technological resources to be incorporated into the teaching-learning process that are made available to students to promote specific learning and potentially allow them to develop transversal skills. Higher education institutions have made progress in developing educational models of competency training. Until now, the greatest difficulty lies in implementing learning activities that allow both developing disciplinary learning and modeling transversal skills (generic competences) for professional life. This work reports an experience based on the incorporation of virtual learning objects, developed under the SCORM standard arranged in an LMS Moodle, in order to develop meaningful learning and to model generic competences in a group of students belonging to the Catholic University of Temuco.

In this paper, we present a new methodology for the assessment of Programming and Data Structures courses in conditions of Covid-19. The study is carried out at the Catholic University of Temuco, based on the suggestions received at the beginning of the pandemic, by students of the Computer Engineering career. The proposal consists of redirecting the assessment to freely accessible online programming platforms. As part of the study, a mapping of the contents to be evaluated in both subjects with problems available on platforms such as LeetCode and CodinGame is carried out. We manage to cover all the content to be evaluated using these platforms. An analysis of the results of the course, applying this new methodology, is made. Through a survey, applied at the end of the semester, we collected information about the perception of students, concerning aspects related to the changes in the assessment of the course. The results of the survey are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively, perceiving improvements in the promotion indicators and the motivation of the students.

Currently, efforts to improve teaching and learning processes in higher education are increasingly being seen. New student-centered approaches, technological support, the heterogeneity of students, are some elements that are being considered in new strategies. On the other hand, there is a large mass of teachers without pedagogical training who tend to replicate models acquired in their own training, which are quite far from current trends. This generates inappropriate pedagogical designs, focused on a traditional training. This article presents a learning module design approach that relies on assessment as its foundation. This approach includes a collaborative platform that facilitates design, especially for non-pedagogical teachers. The platform was validated with five teachers, obtaining satisfactory preliminary results.

The teaching and learning process is still complex in the engineering area. Traditionally there are imperative courses with a high failure rate because of their complicated topics. This work presents a model of learning support with two fundamental aspects: technological support and peer learning. First, the technological platform is a multi-tooled social network. On the other hand, peer learning includes collaboration, bonding, feedback, and autonomous learning, as fundamental aspects of its implementation. Another crucial element of this model is the active participation of the assistants, who are the peers trained to guide the students in the process. This mentoring takes place in two environments, face-to-face and virtual. The face-to-face environment gathers all the infrastructure and human resources of the Colegio de Ayudantes (institutional unit), while the virtual environment contemplates the social network along with a set of tools that support this model. There are initial results of validation of the platform regarding its use and potential. Although this implementation starts in imperative courses of the faculty, it can be easily expanded to other courses of the university. This implementation can be possible due to the unique characteristics of a social network that self-regulates its growth.

The pandemic context forced most of the Higher Education Institutions, and therefore their faculties, to face a semester of teaching in an online mode. The universities defined general guidelines and strategies to try to guarantee a minimum quality of the process. However, the literature reports that, depending on its particularities, preparing a semester-long online course requires a design of several months. Therefore, each lecturer worked according to her experience, guidelines, and support she received: "What could be done, was done." This article reports the teaching experience of the 1st semester 2020 of the Computer Science undergraduate program at the Universidad Católica de Temuco. Some lecturers of this undergraduate program had previous experience in online training; hence they designed strategies that differed in teaching, evaluation, and interaction methodologies while using several technologies available to them. A sample of 115 of our students answered a questionnaire to assess the preferences and problems during this semester. The results show a heterogeneous set of clusters. However, they point to a constructivist asynchronous vision in a group of our students that prefer short videos uploaded by their professors, and the resources that, by their means, they find on the Internet, point towards a constructivist asynchronous vision in a group of our students. The results also allowed us to rescue good practices that help in proposing an emergency online teaching model that will guide the design of the second-semester courses.

Peer learning (PL) is a strategy where students learn from each other without direct teacher intervention. Five pillars support this strategy: interaction, negotiation, organization, feedback, and evaluation. According to the problems students face, self-learning is one of the tools they need to face and is a generic competence they should apply. This article presents a PL experience in the undergraduate degree in Computer Science Engineering (CSE) of the Catholic University of Temuco (UCT), emphasizing how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can support each pillar. The curriculum includes a course called Integration Workshop (IW), a capstone course to instantiate the competences acquired by the students up to that point. In this experience, we joined teams from IW II, as developers, and IW IV, as SCRUM Masters. Students rated the experience positively while highlighting the development of other generic competences such as collaborative work, knowledge management, and valuation and respect for diversity.

Teaching computer programming is a complex task. In computer science programs students usually have big difficulties dealing with programming competence. In regional universities in Chile, this problem tends to increase, because the gaps students have before enroll computer science programs. In order to address this problem, a course in the first year of the curriculum in Computer Science in Temuco Catholic University, has been incorporated. This course supports teaching of computer programming using Lego NXT robots and the NXC language. The methodology additionally supports the generic skills of creativity and innovation, teamwork and written communication. The results obtained are satisfactory, since students can experiment into real and recreational elements, programming bases, obtaining interesting and motivating products early. In addition, students achieve an early approach to advanced concepts such as concurrent programming, threads, multitasking, among others.

Self-regulation on the part of students regarding the use or adoption of technologies is generally directed as a process of dynamic transitions between roles in life, the environment, globalization and ICTs. The objective of this study was to provide a framework to determine the interrelation of activation of the use of ICTs by students in the context of the evaluation of general competences through project-oriented learning. We worked with a sample of 93 students. An experimental design of random sampling was used. In the analysis of results, the degree of use of ICTs according to the convergence model is demonstrated [1]. Consequently, self-regulation training facilitates students to use strategies related to reflective learning in their own personal work environment and collaborative network work environment.

Global changes and current trends have led to major revisions in the field of education. In the context of higher education, it has proliferated successfully to move the curricula to a competency-based education. Also, the incorporation of ICT in the training process is a growing trend that has been strongly positioned in all levels of education. However, beyond the models and paradigms, what is relevant is the implementation of an innovative proposal. This is where the problems of a complex implementation are experienced. At UC Temuco, the computer science program renewed its curriculum to a competency model. For the evaluation of achievement of competences, a course called integration workshop is included in the curriculum at the end of each year. These courses include a series of individual and group strategies, which have been designed, refined and improved over the years. ICT is a strong component in the support of strategies, including tools for collaboration, authorship, software project management, among others. The workshops are evaluated externally through an event called "project fair", where actors from the business, government and academic world are invited. Results have been very satisfactory and have allowed a continuous improvement of the strategies and the selection of ICT support tools.

The breakthrough of information and communication technologies and their smooth incorporation into daily living has brought a cultural change in both, society and education. The traditional and formal paradigms and contexts represent new challenges of adjustments that consider the new kind of student that goes to university classrooms. Thus, the educational model from Universidad Católica de Temuco considers an intensive use of ICT in the educational process, and a gradual growth of the autonomy of students during training. In the Computer Science program, these elements of the model have been partially addressed through the incorporation of e-learning modules that foster autonomy. A technological platform was implemented to support an e-learning methodology. The methodology used in the study is described in this article. The outcomes obtained in courses where the methodology was applied were successful, which made possible new initiatives that include the suggested improvements from the assessment of the conducted experiences.

Today, organizations are beginning to realize the importance of using as much data as possible for decision-making in their strategy. The finding of relevant patterns in enormous amount of data requires automatic machine learning algorithms, among them, a popular option is the mixture-of-experts that allows to model data using a set of local experts. The problem of using typical learning algorithms over Big Data is the handling of these large datasets in primary memory. In this paper, we propose a methodology to learn a mixture-of-experts in a distributed way using PETUUM platform. Particularly, we propose to learn the parameters of mixture-of-experts by adapting the standard stochastic gradient descent in a distributed way. This methodology is applied to people detection with standard real datasets considering accuracy and precision metrics among other. The results show a consistent performance of mixture-of-experts models where the best number of experts varies according to the particular dataset. We also evidence the advantages of the distributed approach by showing the almost linear decreasing of average training time according to the number of processors. In a future work, we expect to apply this methodology to mixture-of-experts with embedded variable selection.

The development of generic skills in engineering education is a demand already established by the industry. In the Unversidad Católica de Temuco, since 2008, a new educational model has been defined, which is a competency-based model. Therefore, each curriculum must define their programs in terms of both specific and generic skills. One of the biggest problems presented by the implementation of the model has been the process of validation of generic skills. This article reports a strategy that facilitates the faculty the validation process of generic skills. This strategy considers two key elements; the use of ICT and the generation of a virtual community of practice. In this community, faculty can access activities uploaded by their peers and can draw on the experience of these, as well as contribute with their own experience.

El Yali National Reserve is a protected area that is priority number one for the National Forestry Corporation (CONAF). It is located in the V region of Chile, where the risk of wildfire is quite high. In this context, training actors involved in combating wildfire is a relevant issue. Under the simulation of serious video games, a simulator that allows this training was built, since it is not possible to recreate realistic scenarios for this kind of training. Current problems in this context are decision-making with incomplete information, and the non-lineal consequences of these decisions. In the first stage of the project the terrain model was built and subjected to a validation process by experts at the University of Playa Ancha. Preliminary results are satisfactory and allow progression to the next stages of the project.

La tendencia natural de la sociedad a satisfacer sus necesidades cotidianas, la ha llevado a adoptar nuevas formas de interacción apoyadas en tecnologías de computación ubicua, que brindan una nueva dimensión de conectividad. Internet de Objetos (Internet of Things [IOT]) es uno de los nuevos conceptos ligados a estas tecnologías. Junto con el surge el de Universidad de Objetos, como una alternativa que permite la interacción entre personas y objetos comunes en escenarios educativos. Bajo este concepto –y con base en los criterios del Modelo Conceptual de Internet de Objetos de Aprendizaje–, se diseñaron e implementaron actividades e-Campus, en varios escenarios, con el propósito de evaluar la aplicación o la pertinencia de la tecnología Near Field Communication en el ambiente universitario. Un riguroso análisis estadístico de los resultados permite concluir que las actividades propician un espacio de interacción satisfactorio para los participantes, mejorando la percepción de usabilidad de los ambientes inteligentes pertenecientes a la IoT.

"La tendencia natural de la sociedad a satisfacer sus necesidades cotidianas, la ha llevado a adoptar nuevas formas de interacción apoyadas en tecnologías de computación ubicua, que brindan una nueva dimensión de conectividad. Internet de Objetos ( Internet of Things [IOT]) es uno de los nuevos conceptos ligados a estas tecnologías. Junto con el surge el de Universidad de Objetos, como una alternativa que permite la interacción entre personas y objetos comunes en escenarios educativos. Bajo este concepto –y con base en los criterios del Modelo Conceptual de Internet de Objetos de Aprendizaje–, se diseñaron e implementaron actividades e-Campus, en varios escenarios, con el propósito de evaluar la aplicación o la pertinencia de la tecnología Near Field Communication en el ambiente universitario. Un riguroso análisis estadístico de los resultados permite concluir que las actividades propician un espacio de interacción satisfactorio para los participantes, mejorando la percepción de usabilidad de los ambientes inteligentes pertenecientes a la IoT."

The competences-based training arises from the company as an educational strategy that addresses the shortcoming claimed by the labor market, in relation to the poor development of many skills in computer science engineers. Some strategies that allow to validate soft skills in a competency-based educative model for a computer science curriculum are described. The preliminary results report retention rates of 77.66% in the first year and 81.66% in the second year, and the pass rates of the first year was 56.12% and 69.10% in the second year.

Effective communication among first responders during response to natural and human-made large-scale catastrophes has increased tremendously during the last decade. However, most efforts to achieve a higher degree of effectiveness in communication lack synergy between the environment and the technology involved to support first responders operations. This article presents a natural and intuitive interface to support Stigmergy; or communication through the environment, based on intuitively marking and retrieving information from the environment with a pointer. A prototype of the system was built and tested in the field, however the pointing activity revealed challenges regarding accuracy due to limitations of the sensors used. The results obtained from these field tests were the basis for this research effort and will have the potential to enable communication through the environment for first responders operating in highly dynamical and inhospitable disaster relief environments.

Remote experimentation laboratories (REL) are systems based on real equipment that allow students to carry out a laboratory practice through the Internet on the computer. In engineering, there have been numerous initiatives to implement REL over recent years, given the fundamental role of laboratory activities. However, in the past efforts have concentrated on laboratory groups interacting face to face, disregarding the capacities of distributed student collaborative environments. This article proposes a model for the implementation of REL in a distributed collaborative scenario, focusing on two crucial key elements: shared knowledge and interaction for collaboration. The model focuses on the methodological aspects of executing REL in a distributed collaborative scenario and disregards technical aspects of the implementation. This study analyses distributed collaborative scenarios where the teacher plays a fundamental role in REL configuration to ensure group collaboration. The new model introduced presents diverse aspects that are associated with the methodological implementation of REL in the field of engineering; hence it is to be regarded as a foundation for teachers developing REL in distributed collaborative scenarios.

Remote labs offer many unique advantages to students as they provide opportunities to access experiments and learning scenarios that would be otherwise unavailable. At the same time, however, these opportunities introduce real challenges to the institutions hosting the remote labs. This paper draws on the experiences of the REXNET project consortium to expose a number of these issues as a means of furthering the debate on the value of remote labs and the best practices in deploying them. The paper presents a brief outline of the various types of remote lab scenarios that might be deployed. It then describes the key human and technological actors that have an interest in or are intrinsic to a remote lab instance, with a description of the role of each actor and their interest. Some relationships between these various actors are then discussed with some factors that might influence those relationships. Finally some general issues are briefly described.

With the rapid development of short-range wireless technology new venues to apply it in more sophisticated, complex, and dynamic environments have been opened. Nevertheless, the applicability of such technology in non-traditional settings like face-to-face encounters and disaster relief environments, remains unclear. This article describes a research effort aimed to narrow that gap by means of using two non-traditional settings as case studies; face-to-face encounters among unacquainted people and first responders in urban disaster relief environments. Among the results obtained are: a) interactions among unacquainted people may be promoted, though the level of interaction becomes easily constrained due to the current state of RF technology and the design of the experiments, and b) it is feasible to obtain a reliable communication platform for first responders operating in disaster relief missions. These results supports the idea that short-range wireless technology may play both a facilitator and a promoter role in face-to-face contexts, and at least a facilitator role in the case of users co-located in highly dynamic contexts.

Remote experimentation laboratories are systems based on real equipment, allowing students to perform practical work through a computer connected to the internet. In engineering fields lab activities play a fundamental role. Distance learning has not demonstrated good results in engineering fields because traditional lab activities cannot be covered by this paradigm. These activities can be set for one or for a group of students who work from different locations. All these configurations lead to considering a flexible model that covers all possibilities (for an individual or a group). An inter-continental network of remote laboratories supported by both European and Latin American institutions of higher education has been formed. In this network context, a learning collaborative model for students working from different locations has been defined. The first considerations are presented. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Los sistemas colaborativos pertenecen al área de investigación llamada CSCW (“Computer-Supported Cooperative Work”). Estos sistemas apoyan a grupos de personas trabajando en equipo, con el fin de alcanzar metas comunes. Un aspecto fundamental en todo proceso de colaboración es la comunicación, y aunque todos los sistemas siguen el mismo patrón arquitectónico, la falta de una definición explícita del patrón hace que sea imposible el reuso de soluciones en este ámbito. Es por eso que en el presente artículo se presenta el patrón arquitectónico U/PC (Users/Processes Communication) que modela los mecanismos de comunicación en los sistemas colaborativos, brindando una solución al problema antes mencionado.

Los sistemas colaborativos pertenecen al área de investigación llamada CSCW ("ComputerSupported Cooperative Work"). Estos sistemas apoyan a grupos de personas trabajando en equipo, con el fin de alcanzar metas comunes. Un aspecto fundamental en todo proceso de colaboración es la comunicación. En el presente artículo se propone un esquema de comunicación que permite modelar los mecanismos de distribución de mensajes que se requieren en todos los sistemas colaborativos. Estos mecanismos proveen comunicación tanto entre usuarios como entre procesos del sistema a través del cual se está colaborando.