Christos Pierrakeas

University of Patras | UP · DEPARTMENT OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

The evolution of geographic information systems (GIS) based on the internet (Web GIS) created new opportunities for the use of GIS technology in education. In the present study a learning environment was developed which incorporates the project-based learning (PBL) methodology based on Web GIS technology. In this context, 3 research projects (GIS b...

Over the last few years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have expanded rapidly and tend to become the most typical form of online and distance higher education. As a result, a tremendous amount of data is generated and stored on MOOCs online learning platforms. In any case, this data should be effectively transformed into knowledge, thus provid...

As gamification may benefit the learning experience, many Technology Acceptance Models affecting the user's acceptance of using gamification have been investigated. However, there has been limited work on the digital skills level and the adoption of user acceptance gamification. This paper examines the user's perceptions of gamification acceptance...

The adult education that is provided by Universities that use distance learning methods is without doubt inseparable from high dropout rates, frequently higher than those in conventional Universities. Dropping out in a University that provides distance education is caused by professional, academic, health and family and personal reasons. Limiting d...

E-Learning is another way of teaching and learning, which includes instruction delivered via Internet. Most of the pedagogical principles that apply to the traditional classroom delivery method also apply to e-Learning, but these principles need to be extended. A case study is realized in the present study. More specifically, the views of forty-fi...

Although teachers and especially those of Primary and Secondary Education are positively predisposed towards new technologies, it seems that they do not embody them in educational procedure. Thus, in the last few years, the efforts to train teachers so that ICT’s are exploited during their teaching practices have been intensified, given the fact th...

Applying data mining methods in the educational field has gained a lot of attention among researchers in recent years. Educational Data Mining has turned into an effective tool for uncovering hidden relationships in educational data and predicting students’ learning outcomes. Several supervised methods have been successfully applied with the purpos...

Massive open online courses (MOOC) constitute an emerging technology for distance and open education while interest in incorporating them in higher education is constantly growing. Due to the free and open access learning opportunities that they offer, they attract an immense number of learners from all over the world. Additionally, because of thei...

Several data mining techniques are currently applied in many areas with great success. Various educational systems collect and use huge amount of data on students, staff and faculty. Researchers have the potential to employ such datasets to examine students’ performance over their learning time—from one semester to another or from one academic year...

In recent years, students' performance prediction has been identified as one of the most essential and challenging research topics for educational institutions. The necessity for exploitation and analysis of data originating from several educational contexts has led to a widespread implementation of familiar machine learning methods trying to effec...

Περίληψη The importance of a distance learning program heavily depends on the type and quality of the provided digital content. The Hellenic Open University (HOU) offers distance learning courses and therefore the volume of the provided digital learning content is significantly large. This fact establishes essential the need for an efficient and e...

Although learning outcomes are recognized as an important component of the instructional design model, few instructional design prescriptions are available for authoring well-structured learning outcomes. This paper focuses on the design and development of a web based tool that facilitates the application of instructional design methodology in orde...

This paper describes both the settings and a subset of the results of an empirical study that has been conducted among the students of the Hellenic Open University. The empirical study's aim was to provide sufficient data for the architectural design of the educational model of students in order to support their educational process. The resulting a...

Open Learning movement opens up opportunities for the collaboration between institutions, educators and learners globally, and for enabling more meaningful engagement in teaching and learning. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), one of the latest internet revolutions, boasting tens or hundreds of thousands of participants worldwide, and, hence, pr...

The ability to effectively administrate educational resources in terms of accessibility, reusability and interoperability lies in the adoption of an appropriate metadata schema, able of adequately describing them. A considerable number of different educational metadata schemas can be found in literature, with the IEEE LOM being the most widely know...

Mobile learning (m-learning) is an emerging area of distance education and there is a great interest in incorporating it in higher education, due to the mobile devices capabilities which are rapidly increasing and renders mobile devices more efficient and more attractive to students. On the other hand, the educational content plays a significant ro...

The evolution of scientific research as well as the development of the relevant technologies and methodologies in the area of distance learning fall within the scope of the objectives the Hellenic Open University whose mission is to provide distance education at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. To develop intelligent e-learning applicatio...

An important task when designing educational material for distance learning is the modeling of the teaching domain. However this representation should be formal and semantically standardized in order to be reusable. In this work we propose an ontology-based model for the formal specification of the relations which have been used for the representat...

The importance of Learning Objects (LOs) in the learning process - especially in the case of distance education - has been underlined significantly in the literature. The ability of administrating LOs in terms of accessibility, reusability and interoperability seems to be ensured by adopting an appropriate metadata schema which fully and adequately...

The learning of programming languages requires the student to develop systematic representations of the lexical constructs and semantic principles of the languages. At the same time, tutors are expected to develop the appropriate training content. In this paper we propose the combination of two techniques to make the above tasks more efficient. Fir...

An Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) offers personalized education to each student in accordance with his/her learning preferences and his/her background. One of the most fundamental components of an ITS is the student model, that contains all the information about a student such as demographic information, learning style and academic performance....

One of the most important tasks in the process of designing educational material for distance learning is the representation and modeling of the cognitive domain to which the material refers. However, this representation should be formal, complete and reusable in order to be used by intelligent tutoring system applications, other knowledge domains...

Educational content plays a significant role in the process of delivering knowledge, that's why it needs to be designed carefully, following designated principles. Learning Objects (LOs) constitute a novel approach in the educational content's organization, bearing features that if effectively used could lead to enhanced e-learning services. What i...

Java is a very popular programming language and many study programs in Informatics worldwide include courses particularly designed for its learning. It is considered as the best paradigm for introducing students with object-oriented programming and concepts. Considering Java's popularity, we initially make an attempt to model this language by using...

Learning outcomes are statements that should accompany any type of educational material intended for lifelong learning. These statements deliver important information, which works as an indicator for students in the process of learning. However, in order for this information to be further utilizable within the context of intelligent e-learning appl...

The ability to predict a student's performance could be useful in a great number of different ways associated with university-level distance learning. Students' key demographic characteristics and their marks on a few written assignments can constitute the training set for a supervised machine learning algorithm. The learning algorithm could then b...

The aim of this paper is to present some early findings of the pilot implementation of Learning Design at the Hellenic Open University (HOU). This study represents the first step of a broader effort that seeks to use learning design tools to support tutors and learners in distance education across our university by charting existing international e...

* Aim of he study The strategies used by nurses in Greece to cope with occupational stress are investigated in this study. * Material and Methods This cohort study tracked 160 nurses working in nursing institutions of two major cities in Greece who have received different level of education. The data collection was carried out by filling anonymousl...

* Aim of he study The strategies used by nurses in Greece to cope with occupational stress are investigated in this study. * Material and Methods This cohort study tracked 160 nurses working in nursing institutions of two major cities in Greece who have received different level of education. The data collection was carried out by filling anonymousl...

We use decision trees and genetic algorithms to analyze the academic performance of students and the homogeneity of tutoring teams in the undergraduate program on Informatics at the Hellenic Open University (HOU). Based on the accuracy of the generated rules, we examine the applicability of the techniques at large and reflect on how one can deploy...

The ability of predicting a student's performance is very important in university-level distance learning environments. The scope of the research reported here is to investigate the efficiency of machine learning techniques in such an environment. To this end, a number of experiments have been conducted using five representative learning algorithms...

Students who enrol in the undergraduate program on informatics at the Hellenic Open University (HOU) demonstrate significant difficulties in advancing beyond the introductory courses. We use decision trees and genetic algorithms to analyze their academic performance throughout an academic year. Based on the accuracy of the generated rules, we analy...

The use of telemedicine in speech and language pathology provides patients in rural and remote areas with access to quality rehabilitation services that are sufficient, accessible, and user-friendly leading to new possibilities in comprehensive and long-term, cost-effective diagnosis and therapy. Online collaboration environments which are used for...

Abstract Students who enrol ,in the undergraduate program on ,informatics at the ,Hellenic Open University (HOU) demonstrate significant difficulties in advancing ,beyond the introductory courses. We have embarked in an effort to analyse their academicperfor mance throughout the academic year, as measured by the homework assignments, and attempt to...

Many students who enrol in the undergraduate program on informatics at the Hellenic Open University (HOU) fail the introductory course exams and drop out. We analyze their academic performance, derive short rules that explain success or failure in the exams and use the accuracy of these rules to reflect on specific tutoring practices that could enh...

We ,use decision trees and genetic algorithms to analyze ,the aca- demic performance,of students throughout an academic year at a distance learn- ing university. Based on the accuracy of the generated rules, and on cross- examinations of various groups of the same student population, we surprisingly observe that students’ performance is clustered a...

Snake venom poisoning is a medical emergency requiring immediate attention. Bites from poisonous European snakes can lead to local tissue damage and systemic symptoms. Vipera ammodytes accounts for the most envenomation in Greece. The demographic and epidemiological characteristics, clinical symptoms and signs, laboratory findings, treatment, and o...

The use of telemedicine in speech and language pathology provides patients in rural and remote areas with access to quality rehabilitation services that are sufficient, accessible, and user-friendly leading to new possibilities in comprehensive and long-term, cost-effective diagnosis and therapy. This paper discusses the use of online collaboration...

In this paper, we present an expert system, called PASS (Predicting Ability of Students to Succeed), which is used to predict how certain is that a student of a specific type of high school in Greece will pass the national exams for entering a higher education institute. Prediction is made at two points. An initial prediction is made after the seco...

The purpose of this study is to present the experiences from the quality assessment of the educational web sites of two modules of the Computer Science curriculum in the Hellenic Open University. This paper presents the quality assessment methods currently available, discusses their requirements and their application, as well as the problems that m...

This paper reports the results of a survey conducted to examine the root causes leading to student dropout at a Greek distance education university. Data was gathered from two different courses – an undergraduate course leading to a Bachelors degree in Informatics (characterized by high dropout rates), and a postgraduate course leading to a Masters...

This paper presents the approach followed for the evaluation of the educational system of the Informatics Course in the Hellenic Open University. Emphasis is given on the method of presentation, so that it can be applied in similar evaluation cases and on the discussion of the lessons learned during this evaluation. The presented method can be used...

Student dropout occurs quite often in universities providing distance education. The scope of this research is to study whether the usage of machine learning techniques can be useful in dealing with this problem. Subsequently, an attempt was made to identifying the most appropriate learning algorithm for the prediction of students’ dropout. A numbe...

This paper focuses on university-level education offered by methods of distance learning in the field of computers and aims at the investigation of the main causes for student dropouts. The presented study is based on the students of the Course of “Informatics”, Faculty of Science and Technology of the Hellenic Open University and investigates the...

An anatomical filter based exposure equalization technique in mammography is evaluated quantitatively using a phantom. The evaluation is carried out by a comparative observer performance study, comparing the equalization technique with a conventional one based on visualization of low contrast, 6 mm circular details and high contrast, 0.5 mm and 0.2...

An anatomical filter-based exposure equalization technique in mammography is clinically evaluated. An observer performance comparative study, between this technique and the conventional one, is carried out on the basis of the visualization of six anatomical features situated at the breast periphery. The effect of parenchymal breast patterns and com...