For the new educational models, it is essential to include teaching strategies that allow students to customize their learning based on their competencies, skills, and preferences, as well as strategies that support individual monitoring of student learning. However, the implementation of these strategies in teaching is complex for professors, and it gets complicated, as the number of students in the class-room increases. In this work, the design and development of a mobile learning platform are presented, which provides the professor and student with multiple services for the learning monitoring and customization based on learning styles, context information, and mobile learning objects. Our platform is composed of three main components: (1) A mobile learning object generator system, (2) A learning object repository, and (3) A student-oriented mobile application. The in-tegration of these three components allows and facilitates the professor the im-plementation of various strategies for monitoring and customization of learning systematically. We carried out a usability assessment of the learning object gener-ator system through a field study with five research professors. According to the obtained results, the learning object generator system presents a good acceptance, satisfaction, and applicability from the professors' perspective.

Currently, there is a trend to develop context-aware mobile distributed systems (MDS), such as systems that recommend places according to the location and the path of users. Some of the key challenges in the development of this type of systems are the following: acquisition, management and use of data context. In this paper, we propose two-level software architecture to obtain, use and provide context information in a MDS. From our point of view, the proposed architecture takes into account the requirements that emerge from data collection, use and management of context, as well as the own features of MDS. Based on our software architecture, a context-aware group communication system is implemented, which allows members to have four types of context: physical activity, logical activity, location and level of sound.

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This article presents a prototype called PMIIDAS. The prototype focuses on the creation of open educational resources based on pedagogical and institutional guidelines, their representation using semantic indexing, and the storage and retrieval thereof by Semantic Web technologies. The use of this prototype can have benefits such as the reuse of open educational resources, which are distributed in institutional repositories or educational platforms by applying a semantic approach, search and retrieval of relevant information can be done through the use of ontologies and user profiles; as well as the exchange of educational resources among educational institutions.

The paper describes the design and implementation of a semantic web service that retrieves theses and extends the keyword based-search of a DSpace repository taking into account the roles of advisors and steering committee members formally represented into a custom-made ontology. The service uses SPARQL queries and the serialization module of RDF DSpace, this links the item submission process and the ontology, thus the more theses are added into a repository, the more instances are inserted into the ontology. The paper provides empirical insights about how to reuse theses metadata and includes the results of an exploratory and self-management survey of usability heuristic evaluation of a web site that enables to access the proposed service. Heuristics were estimated with a purposive sample of students, teachers, and managers, the results indicated a high satisfaction level and showed that the service increased theses accessibility in the web environment. The service also generates semantically enriched datasets that coexist with the repository, they are of utility and value to educational organizations as they give institutional visibility. INDEX TERMS Educational technology, semantic web, web services, information retrieval.