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| Fundación La Caixa will finance the collaboration of the UMU group with the prestigious US research center | The professor at the Faculty of Informatics will investigate the use of videogames for learning skills in schoolchildren and the experience of those who take massive open courses (MOOCs) on different platforms Fundación la Caixa has selected two projects by researcher from the University of Murcia José Antonio Ruipérez Valiente to participate in a joint initiative with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The 'MIT- Spain La Caixa Foundation Seed Fund' call aims to promote knowledge and cutting-edge research to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Ruipérez Valiente is part of the CyberDataLab research laboratory of the Faculty of Informatics. This program provides financial support to projects developed between Spanish universities and research centers and MIT research groups, with the aim of promoting collaboration and transversality in the generation of knowledge. The first of Ruipérez Valiente's selected projects is titled 'Using learning analytics in games for learning to assess key skills for the 21st century'.
This is an investigation in which Baltasar Fernández Manjón (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Yoon Jeon Kim (MIT Playful Journey Lab) and Eric Klopfer (MIT Education Arcade) also participate. Specifically, the project seeks to identify and measure learning in skills that children and young people achieve in learning through the use of video games.
The researchers start from the hypothesis that current educational systems are highly content-focused, with methods that generate stress, and are committed to learning through the use of games and videogames that allow evaluating, not only content knowledge, but also key behaviors or cognitive skills related to long-term success in today's society. The role of UMU researchers coordinated by José Antonio Ruipérez will be to analyze all the data obtained from field research carried out in schools by MIT groups.
All the data that is processed will serve to establish the standards for measuring competencies through this type of teaching. The financing of La Caixa will facilitate the joint work of all the institutions involved by financing travel and joint actions.
Furthermore, the University of Murcia has signed a contract with MIT to carry out the data analysis work.
This is the first contract for the development of research activities established by the University of Murcia with the prestigious technological research institute. The second of the selected projects is called 'Learning analytics on MOOCs in global and regional environments analyzing the variability between platforms and nationalities' and will be developed through the collaboration of José Antonio Ruipérez Valiente by the UMU and Justin Reich (MIT Teaching Systems Lab). This work seeks to measure the different experiences of users of massive and open online courses (MOOCs) that became popular as of 2012.
Specifically, based on data analysis, the research seeks to find out in How different is the experience of use in large global platforms such as edX, Coursera or FutureLearn, behind which are some of the largest universities and most prestigious institutions in the world; regarding the experience on platforms that maintain their target audience in specific geographic areas; for example Edraak for the Arab world or XuetangX for the Chinese population. The objective is to explore the variability and key differences in the demographic characteristics and behaviors of students in these different MOOC platforms depending on their educational context.
This information will make it possible to differentiate global and context patterns to apply them to educational policies. José Antonio Ruipérez Valiente completed his postdoctoral training at MIT and joined the University of Murcia thanks to a Juan de la Cierva scholarship from the Ministry for the recovery of talent. To the third call of the 'MIT- Spain La Caixa Foundation Seed Fund', opened in 2019, 25 projects from 23 Spanish centers were presented.
Once assessed by the expert committee, 12 have been selected, four in the health field, four in the global economy and four in the energy field. Collaboration with MIT brings great value to Spanish research, since it is one of the best research institutions internationally.
Among the teachers in his faculty are about 80 Nobels, and his students have promoted more than 30,000 companies.
The maximum aid per project is € 30,000. The research centers where the chosen initiatives are carried out belong to the communities of Aragon, Catalonia, Madrid, Murcia, the Basque Country and Valencia.
Source: Universidad de Murcia
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