The European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) 2015, with the theme Design for Teaching and Learning in a Networked World, took place in Toledo from 15–18 September, addressing the pressing need to shape learning arrangements in such a way that they exploit the potentials and meet the requirements of a networked world. It was a unique opportunity for researchers, practitioners, educational developers, and policy makers to address current challenges and advances in the field. Also, numerous examples of excellence and innovation have been higlighted in the work presented at the conference.
At the conference, Juan Valor, an active member of the MLLP Research group that is participating in the EMMA project, presented a demo of the “MLLP transcription and translation platform”, which is used in the EMMA project. Also, some of the most recent work in the automatic multilingual subtitling field was presented in the oral presentation of the paper “Efficient generation of high-quality multilingual subtitles for video lecture repositories”. During the presentations the EMMA project generated considerable interest among the attendants from universities around Europe.
In the paper a study to evaluate the efficiency of the manual review process from automatic subtitles in comparison with the generation of video subtitles from scratch was presented. The study is based on user evaluations in the UPV’s poliMedia video lecture repository, on which automatic transcriptions in Spanish, Catalan and English, and automatic translations from Spanish into English were generated. Results clearly indicate the convenience of providing automatic subtitles in the generation of video subtitles, the reason for this is that they provide timesaving of almost 75%. If you want to give it a try for your MOOCs you can submit your MOOC proposal to be hosted on the EMMA platform (find out how to become an EMMA MOOC provider here), or go to our TTP platform website.
During the conference, excellent talks were given on technological and pedagogical underpinning, individual, social and organizational learning processes, learning communities and contexts, open learning arrangements and technological enhanced learning in developing countries and users with special needs. Moreover keynotes from Lisa Marie Blaschke, Juan Pelegrín (member of the EU commission) and Mark Brown have put very interesting and important topics on the table. It was an excellent experience!