Gamification is a viable strategy used to enhance motivation and engagement in programming classes among students. However, automated evaluation capabilities, which are crucial for giving students fast and correct feedback, are frequently lacking in currently available gamification technologies. This study proposes a novel web-based application that combines automated programming assessment features with gamification concepts; the aim is to provide students taking a programming course with an engaging learning environment. A survey conducted with 215 undergraduate students assessed how the tool affected the motivation and engagement of students. The findings show that the tool had a beneficial impact on students’ willingness to participate in class, study, increase their self-confidence, engage in healthy competition with peers, and learn from their mistakes. The qualitative feedback that students offered regarding the features of the tool that they liked best is also covered in the study. This paper contributes to the field of programming education by presenting a detailed gamified tool, incorporating automated evaluation and gamification in a web-based platform.

Given the importance of developing and offering accessible education for all, indispensable aspects of education for sustainable development (ESD) are needed. This study addresses that need by proposing a quality self-assessment for virtual education from an accessibility perspective. This proposal is based on previous literature about quality assurance in e-learning that considered accessibility and its application in the field of higher education. The bibliographic review was conducted by following Multivocal Literature Review (MLR) guidelines. The initial search returned 999 items from 5 academic databases and 32,200 professional sources from Google. After reviewing the sources, 37 of them were included. Then, the accessibility criteria were identified and integrated into an evaluation model. Such a model is divided into four dimensions: (1) organization, (2) student body, (3) teaching, and (4) infrastructure. The model also includes a set of standards (16), requirements (48), and evidence (63) that apply to each dimension. Moreover, self-assessment guidelines for accessible virtual education were proposed. They included a conceptual and theoretical framework, a self-assessment model, and a methodology for applying the model. The methodology included five phases: planning, model tuning or refinement of the model, evaluation, results, and continuous improvement. As future work, the implementation and validation of the guidelines will be carried out.

Contribution: A redesign of the Moodle platform to adapt digital educational content [learning objects (LOs)] to the specific needs of students with disabilities. The approach, extendable to a range of disciplines, was empirically tested with blind and deaf engineering students. Background: Previous studies identified difficulties that blind and deaf students face in accessing digital content for learning. General guidelines and specific tools are available to help educators adapt digital content and existing learning platforms for access by students with varying abilities/capacities. Such tools are usually for a specific disability rather than a range of capacities, and few provide empirical evidence of effectiveness. Intended Outcomes: The engineering-related digital content adapted using the techniques described in this paper should enable blind and/or deaf students to use an oscilloscope, understand communication channels, and distinguish the different types of telecommunication networks. Application Design: The Moodle learning platform was adapted using existing e-learning accessibility standards so that digital LOs could be automatically presented in formats accessible to blind and/or deaf students. This model is extendable for other types of disabilities, helping educators adapt existing content for access by students with differing capacities. The teacher adds content (in non-auditory and non-visual formats to describe content otherwise inaccessible to deaf or blind students) and students upload reusable profiles/metadata describing their specific accessibility needs to connect to suitably adjusted content. Findings: Learning improvement with the adjusted platform was evaluated via multiple choice pre- and post-tests. Students' learning performance improved significantly across all groups: blind (45%), deaf (46.25%) and deaf-blind (87.5%).

The need for adaptive e-learning environments that respond to learning variability is now a fundamental requirement in education, as it helps to ensure that students learn and pass their courses within a set time frame. Although guidelines, techniques and methods have been established in recent years to contribute to the development of accessible and adaptable e-learning environments that promote digital inclusion, their implementation is challenging due to the lack of knowledge of an adequate way to do it and because it is considered more of a technological competence for scholars in the area. In this context, automated support for adapting material that responds to the correct use of accessibility metadata not only provides a way to improve the description of adapted educational resources, but also facilitates their search according to the needs and preferences of students, particularly those with disabilities. In this article, we carry out a multilevel methodological proposal for the automatic adaptation of open educational resources, in order to provide a tool that contributes to the accessibility and correct use of their metadata in e-learning environments. A research is conducted with students with disabilities to establish their real needs and preferences, highlighting the need to strengthen the adequate description and coherent alternative text in images, the correct subtitling in videos and the conversion of audio to text, data that are relevant to our proposal. The research conducted aims to contribute with an automated support tool in the generation of accessible educational resources that are correctly labeled for search and reuse. This research also aims to support researchers in artificial intelligence applications to address challenges and opportunities in the field of virtual education, in addition to providing an overview that could help those who generate educational resources and maintain their interest in making them accessible.

People with different capacities, such as the deaf and blind, have problems accessing educational content due to lack of accessible technology. Accessibility and usability are closely related concepts that share the goals for a satisfactory user experience. Existing literature establishes a direct relation between accessibility and usability, and reports that there are problems with both in learning platforms, and more generally with most websites. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the accessibility and usability of a learning platform by interrogating its participants. Three groups of students with different capacities (blind, deaf and deaf-blind) used an accessible learning platform prototype to assess the accessibility and usability of the platform and its contents. This article presents a comparative study of the perception and attitude of blind and deaf students towards the use of a learning platform adapted to their personal needs. Results showed that their attitude to the adaptation was very positive but there were differences in the perception of the ease of use of the application and with the level of difficulty to access the learning content. This work contributes to the body of knowledge by showing the effects that adaptations have on learning contents for blind and deaf students in terms of accessibility and ease of use through the analysis of the perceptions of participants. Future work may consider increasing the sample of students, as well as developing and testing new technologies and approaches that address other forms of functional diversity.