PONTE EN LÍNEA: A STRATEGY FROM DATA-BASED RESPONSE SYSTEM FOR

PERSONALIZED LEARNING
LEÓN MARTÍNEZ, Jorge, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); TAPIA RANGEL, Edith, National
Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico

Abstract
The implementation case of "Ponte en Línea" is presented, a data-based response system for personalized
learning organized by mobile-based micro-learning structures called UAPA (Learning Support Units). This
program was implemented by the Faculty of Accounting and Administration (FCA) and the Coordination of Open
University and Distance Education (CUAED), both dependencies of the National Autonomous University of
Mexico (UNAM), for the benefit of the student population.

Introduction
Today, students have at their disposal large amounts of information which can support them in their learning
processes, institutions of higher education, aware of this, make extraordinary efforts to generate and make
available to students, educational resources developed by their teaching staff, either to use they in independent
study or as part of their teachers’ teaching strategies. Additionally, mobile devices have permeated society
irreversibly and they have allowed access to content to be generalized, in such a way that they can be recovered
virtually at any time and place where there is an Internet connection.

Considering these situations, the "Ponte en Línea" program was proposed, to bring young students from the
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM by its initials in Spanish) closer to them, educational resources
developed through a collaborative effort between an academic entity and the Coordination of Open University and
Distance Education (CUAED by its initials in Spanish).

“Ponte en línea” is considered a space for learning by presenting resources in a data-based response system for
personalized learning. The categorization of the information included in this space is based on the organization
and cataloging of the so-called Support Units for Learning (UAPA by its initials in Spanish), which are mobile-
based micro-learning tools that have their origin in academic undergraduate programs. The elements of this
proposal will now be presented.

Micro-learning
Hug cited by Sun et al. (2017) defined micro learning “as learning activities that are carried out within fragmented
time pieces”. While micro learning is a highly accepted resource in the field of job training, Robes cited by
Coakley, Garvey & O'Neill (2017), notes that micro-learning “can even potentially be used to compliment, rather
than replace, more formal, time-consuming means of learning, further indicating the flexibility of the approach”.

In the case of UNAM, micro learning has been implemented through UAPA, which is a self-contained,
interoperable and reusable educational resource that promotes autonomous learning in the student through
logical sequencing and interaction between objectives, activities and contents oriented to favor meaningful
learning.

The UAPA exposes a theme through a didactic sequence and a structure made up of:

 Introduction. Text that presents in a general way the contents of the UAPA indicating how they are
organized, their relevance and suggestions for their study.
 Objective. It establishes the goal that the user will reach when concluding the study of UAPA
 Content. It refers to the presentation in different formats of the disciplinary, procedural or attitudinal
knowledge that the user wishes to apprehend.
 Learning activities. Work designed for the user to achieve the learning objective.
  Self-appraisal. Automatic evaluation with positive and negative feedback that measures if the learning
objective was reached.
 Information sources. List of documents that served as reference for the construction of UAPA.
Due to its conception and structure, the UAPA can be used, reused or serves as a reference during different
moments of the teaching and learning processes.

Mobile-based micro-learning
The Mobile Global Report, published by comScore in 2017, established that mobile devices have the first place
among users worldwide. In Mexico alone, 89% of Internet users connect to the Internet through their Smartphone
above laptop computers, desktop computers and tablets (Asociación de Internet.mx, 2018). The Mobile Global
Report concluded that many of the behaviors driven by mobile consumption align with the human needs
established in the famous Maslow's pyramid.

With the above, it is evident that mobile devices have been transformed from communication tools to life
instruments for people as they support the satisfaction of practically the entire Maslow's pyramid of needs, and in
the case of students, they have become instruments to develop their school and social activities. In other words,
students now require learning tools based on mobile devices, that’s the reason why these tools must consider
some of the aspects that mobile-learning (m-learning) comprises. Kukulska-Hulme and Traxler cited by Latchem
(2018) characterize m-learning as “a personal, unobtrusive, spontaneous, “anytime, anywhere” way to learn and
access educational tools and material that enlarges access to Education For All [and] reinforces learners sense of
ownership of the learning experience, offering them flexibility in how, when and where they learn’”.

From this perspective and given that mobile devices also allow access to educational materials, it must be
guaranteed that UAPAs are fully operable from these devices. In this sense, the UAPAS are considered as
mobile-based micro-learning tools, since in addition to the structure that shapes them previously, they are built
according to the rules of responsive design. The responsive design implies that the "applications are built to
change in response to available screen size. The idea is to build one application that looks good on both large
desktop workstations and small tablets or even smartphones "(Vesterli, 2017).

In this way, the UAPA is an example of the so-called mobile-based micro-learning that in the words of Nikou
(2018) "combines features of mobile learning and micro-learning to deliver small learning units and short-term
learning activities". This is because UAPAs have the potential to support learners' autonomy to facilitate self-
directed learning. As Meng and Li (2016) point out “with this learning form, learners’ learning activities are not
confined by time and place; they can study anytime, anywhere with relatively small learning units for a short time.
Combing the two learning forms, mobile micro-learning has the features of convenience, flexibility and
interactivity.”

Cataloging
Cataloging is the process by which metadata is generated for educational resources. Metadata is then "all that
descriptive information about the context, quality, condition or characteristics of a resource, data or object that
has the purpose of facilitating its recovery, authentication, evaluation, preservation or interoperability" (Senso and
de la Rosa, 2003).

Among other things, cataloging has the following objectives: the identification of resources in different
environments; the description of the resources, their location and accessibility; the management of its legal use;
and the generation of automatic responses by crossing data. In this sense, the generation and validation of
metadata for the UAPA became important, since it allows, among other things, increasing the accessibility to
them, facilitating their search and recovery, decrease traffic on the network since the data is retrieved through
metadata information, establish the conditions of use and exploitation of the resource, and improve the conditions
of reuse of resources for teaching and self-directed learning (Marzal, Calzada & Cuevas, 2006).

The implementation of the cataloging for UAPAs required the initial effort of a group of librarians who defined the
metadata scheme would be based on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, which provides simple and normalized
standards levels to facilitate the search, sharing and management of information through the description of
resources. Fields related to the academic structure that gave rise to the resource were added to this scheme.
Subsequently, a revision of the syntax of the elements of the metadata schema was carried out, that is, they were
established among other things: the elements to be considered by resource, the order of registration and the way
in which the information for each element would be encoded. After a pilot implementation was carried out, the
need to establish semantics for the scheme was identified, which established the use of specific vocabulary for
some elements.

Finally, it was defined that the metadata would be incorporated externally, that is, they would be described in a
database that would link to the referenced resource. In this way, it was possible for UAPAs to be organized and
cataloged in the data-based response system for personalized learning called “Ponte en Línea”.

Data-based response system for personalized learning

Bulger (2016) establishes that personalized learning "describes adaptation to students' unique combination of
goals, interests, and competencies and the ongoing process of shifting instruction as these conditions change"
and that currently includes a wide spectrum of implementations that go from the interfaces customizable to
adaptive tutors, or educational events focused on the student learning management systems.

Nowadays, personalized learning systems can be categorized into two groups mainly: the group of adaptive
systems that seek to reflect and support the learning process, which is flexible and is constantly changing; and
response systems, which offer an interface with predetermined and hyperlinked contents, such as an interactive
textbook or as recommendation systems (Bulger, 2016).

Within the response systems, there are those that are based on data and provide materials appropriate to the
level of competence of students based on the collection of information on use and search for them. Through
analytical information, these platforms recommend playlists that give a different line of study to each student. An
important aspect to consider in these systems is that they favour socialization, in such a way that the student
does not feel isolated in the process. To solve this situation, data-based response systems can allow users to
share their playlists, so that they share their journey with their peers in case it is useful for someone else.

Implementation of "Ponte en Línea" in the Faculty of Accounting and Administration (FCA by its
initials in Spanish)
At the beginning of 2018, CUAED proposed the FCA a program for the creation of UAPA, in order to comply with
the Strategic Program 7 "Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Learning and Knowledge
Technologies (TAC) ", Line of action 7.7" Open access policy of the UNAM ", project 7.7.2. "Support the
academic entities in the creation of contents for their inclusion in the different repositories of the UNAM" of the
Institutional Development Plan of Dr. Enrique Graue Wiechers, rector of UNAM.

The program was approved and during the period from February to December 2018, the planning of activities for
the construction of the UAPAs was carried out. The program counted on the participation of more than 50
professors of the FCA of the careers of Accounting, Administration and Informatics. During that period, more than
300 UAPAs were developed.

For the second half of 2018, the FCA got in touch with CUAED to propose that through the UAPA, the hundreds
of educational resources (in multiple formats) generated by the FCA itself over the course of 5 years would be
organized. It was defined that "Ponte en Línea FCA" (https://ponteenlinea.fca.unam.mx/) was a program of the
FCA, in collaboration with the CUAED of UNAM, to make available to students various digital educational
resources for use and reuse during their learning process. The proposal was accepted and the resources were
organized under the categorization and cataloging generated for the UAPA, so they would be accessed through
them on the site "Ponte en Línea FCA". This is how "Ponte en Línea FCA" is organized by UAPAs from where
you access other educational resources related to the subject such as digital notes, audiotexts and video lessons.

The site was designed and implemented in Drupal, an open content manager, organized by categories in such a
way that it could function as a data-based response system for personalized learning. In this way the student
could access the resources through searches for keywords related to the subjects of his degree. “Ponte en línea
FCA” is also self-managed, and is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Conclusions
If mobile-based micro-learning has been a widely accepted option for professional training, it is important to
implement it in the higher education educational field, since at the same time that it graduates professionals, it
prepares them for educational formats that will be found in his professional training throughout his life.

Another aspect that universities should consider is the personalization of learning, and a strategy to start with this
scheme is the implementation of data-based response systems for personalized learning, as in the case of "Ponte
en Línea FCA".

References
Periodicals

Marzal, M., Calzada, J., and Cuevas, A. (2006). Development of a Metadata Scheme to describe Educational
Resources: The Mimeta Application Profile. Revista Española de Documentación Científica, vol(9,24), 551-571.
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high school students. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 34(3), 269-278.
Senso, J.A., & Rosa Piñero, A. (2003). El concepto de metadato: algo más que descripción de recursos electrónicos.
Ciência da Informação, 32(2), 95-106. Retrieved from https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0100-19652003000200011
Chapters in books

Coakley D., Garvey R. and O’Neill Í. (2017). Micro-learning—Adopting Digital Pedagogies to Facilitate Technology-
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Vesterli, S. (2017). Layout and Skins. in Oracle ADF Survival Guide (pp. 53–76). Berkeley, C.A.: Apress.
Conference paper

Meng, J. and Li, Z. (2016). Feasibility of Applying Mobile Micro-learning to College English Learning. Paper presented
at the 2016 International Seminar on Education Innovation and Economic Management (SEIEM 2016), China.
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Websites and online resources

Asociación de Internet.mx (2018) Estudio sobre los Hábitos de los usuarios de Internet en México 2018. México.
Retrieved from https://www.asociaciondeinternet.mx

Bulger, M. (2016, July 22). The conversations we´re not having. Data and Society Working Pape. . Retrieved from
https://datasociety.net/pubs/ecl/PersonalizedLearning_primer_2016.pdf

comScore (2017) Mobile Global Report. Comparativa internacional sobre tendencias y comportamientos
móviles.. México. Retrieved from https://www.comscore.com/lat/Insights/Presentations-and-
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Webpages

Facultad de Contaduría y Administración (2019) Ponte en línea FCA. Retrieved from

https://ponteenlinea.fca.unam.mx/