A significant amount of electricity in numerous regions worldwide is used for lighting roads, squares, and other public spaces. Renewable energy can contribute notably to electricity usage for public lighting. This paper focuses on the day‐ahead scheduling of a hybrid renewable energy system (HRES) exploiting solar–wind energy potential to meet the electrical energy needs of public lighting. The studied HRES provides electricity for a Wi‐Fi hotspot and a charging hotspot for the end users and has an energy storage system that ensures a reliable electricity supply without interruptions. The day‐ahead scheduling of the studied HRES is based on electricity generation forecasting by using a deep‐learning approach. Particularly, the long short‐term memory model is utilized, considering the fact that it is able to perceive long‐term dependencies among the time series. Moreover, the model's performance is investigated through the determination of diverse inputs: (a) historical data, (b) weather predictions, and (c) historical data with weather predictions. Multiple scenarios of energy consumption are assumed and applied to optimize the day‐ahead scheduling. A new recommendation method is proposed and applied for day‐ahead scheduling, utilizing the power forecasts to achieve optimum operation and energy savings. The results point out that the utilization of the proposed recommendation method controls loads when a shortage in power generation and battery capacity is forecasted for the day ahead, leading to significant energy savings and minimizing the power demand from the grid.

Appears in: EDULEARN21 Proceedings Publication year: 2021Pages: 11850-11855ISBN: 978-84-09-31267-2ISSN: 2340-1117doi: 10.21125/edulearn.2021.2473Conference name: 13th International Conference on Education and New Learning TechnologiesDates: 5-6 July, 2021Location: Online Conference

1 National Centre fir Scientific Research "Demokritos" (GREECE)2 Master S.A. - Consulting & Education (GREECE)

The paper presents the development of a prototype system for educational tourism in the context of the CLOUDLEDGE ("CLOUD Learning on the EDGE of TOurism and Culture") project. Educational tourism is an area with significant growth potential, in which ICT technologies and solutions can help create new value-added tourism products and services to advance local economies. The objective of the project is to study, develop, implement and validate new technology-based solutions and business models for educational tourism. We argue that while new technologies offer several advantages, a holistic examination of educational tourism stakeholders and their needs is required, calling for tailored solutions and a combination of training interventions coupled with relevant digital solutions. To derive the appropriate training service mix, the analysis follows the principles of the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM). Training strategies must build upon the specific needs and requirements of the application domain, both regarding processes and users targeted. For this reason, there is a need for the development of a new approach, using existing tools and customising others where necessary. To derive the objectives of the system, we investigated the requirements of the application area in question and the affordances of the current state-of-the-art in education and training. The paper consolidates findings to produce the system requirements and presents the design of a prototype training environment for educational tourism. Following a definition of the objectives of the design process, and the identification of the characteristics of the desired solution, the design of the system is presented. The proposed cloud-based solution combines market insight with educational content development and ubiquitous and contextualised educational service delivery. For this purpose, it combines functionalities for tourist market analysis, learning content development and management, learning service orchestration, management and delivery via a mobile service interface.

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have evolved rapidly during the last decade, and many architecture types have been proposed for distributed and interconnected systems. However, most systems are implemented following fragmented approaches for specific application domains, introducing difficulties in providing unified solutions. However, the unification of solutions is an important feature from an IoT perspective. In this paper, we present an IoT platform that supports multiple application layer communication protocols (Representational State Transfer (REST)/HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), and Websockets) and that is composed of open-source frameworks (RabbitMQ, Ponte, OM2M, and RDF4J). We have explored a back-end system that interoperates with the various frameworks and offers a single approach for user-access control on IoT data streams and micro-services. The proposed platform is evaluated using its containerized version, being easily deployable on the vast majority of modern computing infrastructures. Its design promotes service reusability and follows a marketplace architecture, so that the creation of interoperable IoT ecosystems with active contributors is enabled. All the platform’s features are analyzed, and we discuss the results of experiments, with the multiple communication protocols being tested when used interchangeably for transferring data. Developing unified solutions using such a platform is of interest to users and developers as they can test and evaluate local instances or even complex applications composed of their own IoT resources before releasing a production version to the marketplace.

Recent years have seen the growing digitisation of cultural heritage, leveraged by innovative information technologies (imaging technologies, multimedia, virtual reality etc.). Advanced digitisation technologies have been instrumental in transforming conservation and scientific research methods regarding cultural heritage, as well as people’s experience of cultural heritage relics, monuments and events, thus paving the way for novel consumer services. The present paper revolves around the use of advanced 2D/3D digital scanning of large scale objects and surroundings and the valorisation of the digital spatial models produced, in order to advance preservation efforts, to enhance scientific research work and to create unique, immersive cultural experiences, using affordable consumer electronics. With regards to the latter, the proposed DiscoVRCoolTour prototype specifically targets the production, marketing and consumption of cultural tourism. Digitisation technologies are already in use in the context of cultural tourism (e.g. in museums and monuments). However, limited research and solutions can be found with respect to the interaction between cultural heritage, scan/photo and immersive technologies, potential customers’ and visitors’ experiences in the cultural tourism locations, events and attractions. Physical as well as virtual customer services based on digitisation technologies for cultural tourism attractions, locations and entire destinations are still not exploited properly. Overall, a manifold of applications and services can be generated from the adoption and adaptation of relevant 2D/3D digital scanning technologies already applied in other sectors (e.g. construction industry). In this context, the paper first presents relevant digital technologies for digital data acquisition of large scale objects and surroundings and discusses critical aspects of the proposed solution, namely with regards to digital imaging, scan/photographing methods, virtual reality experience, secure metadata storage, etc. Subsequently, the applications and expected benefits of the DiscoVRCoolTour prototype for cultural heritage conservation and valorisation are discussed, including new emerging forms of cooperation and novel “technology-induced” business models.

Active learning, described as learning through the active participation of students, has received considerable attention in recent decades. The term broadly describes a student centered approach, in which the responsibility for learning is placed upon the student, often working in collaboration with their peers (group assignments, discussions, think pairs, etc). The pedagogical merits of active learning for universities have long been acknowledged, as well as its challenges. Active learning can increase student achievement and create positive relationships among students. Nonetheless, for many educators there remain questions about what active learning is and how it can be effectively implemented. Technology can further enhance the advantages of active learning, providing significant improvements with regards to the structure and nature of teacher-student, student-student and teacher-teacher collaboration within and between universities and enable a variety of formal and informal learning settings, designed to create a variety of cognitive, social, and behavioural impacts on students.

Increasing the current low uptake of Open Education Resources (OER) is a key challenge for researchers and practitioners in the field. User studies have shown that collaboration is a main success factor for successful open educational activities. However, effective collaboration in open educational contexts requires well planned processes and platforms supporting collaboration, in particular in physically distributed settings. We have been investigating the value of such platforms, their main features and user requirements to enable collaboration from immature ideas to completed resources. We used quantitative and qualitative research methods to collect insights from potential users of such collaboration platforms to validate our approach. Based on these insights, we developed a collaboration platform for open education. We validated our platform using observation groups and focus groups to identify the key design principles of powerful collaboration platforms for Open Education. Examples are the need for a simple tool, use of a common terminology, and considering Intellectual Property Rights. In this paper, we present our findings from an initial validation of our collaboration platform and give recommendations towards powerful collaboration platforms for open educational contexts.

Modern technology and the advent of Open Educational Resources ( OER) have fundamental effects on learning and teaching. Rather than being mere dispensers of information, modern teachers increasingly assume a proactive role, exploiting OER to enrich their course and didactic material and also engaging personally in the production of new digital content. Peer production is also growing, supported by the new collaborative possibilities afforded by the internet. The present paper will discuss the emerging paradigm of teachers as makers of educational content and explores the challenges of content re- use and collaborative authorship, in terms of skills, working methodologies and authoring environment capabilities.Drawing on these cases the paper proposes an innovative, two- level collaborative course development framework, aimed at promoting and supporting reciprocal learning and dialogue among educators, to develop didactic material that serves the learners' needs.

The limited adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) has kicked off the launch of several projects to search for possible solutions. One of these projects is “Open Educational Ideas and Innovations” (OEI2). The goal of this project is to find alternatives for increasing the uptake of OER and facilitating the collaborative development of OER. To enhance the experience of the users of open education, we interviewed twelve educators and researchers from different higher education institutions across Europe focusing on gathering insights about idea sharing experiences. In this paper, we present our key findings based on these interviews and outline some recommendations for our next open educational platform. One of the main principles of our proposal is providing an end-to-end platform that supports educators right from the very beginning to the very end, instead of focusing on the content delivery only. An open education initiative starts with a preliminary idea whose owner shares with the other interested educators who in turn collaborate altogether to sharpen the idea and generate the content so that it becomes suitable for an open educational course.

Already existing open educational resources in the field of Business and Management have a high potential for enterprises to address the increasing training needs of their employees. However, it is difficult to act on OERs as some data is hidden. In the meanwhile, numerous repositories provide Linked Open Data on this field. Though, users have to search a number of repositories with heterogeneous interfaces in order to retrieve the desired content. In this paper, we present the strategies to gather heterogeneous learning objects from the Web of Data, and we provide an overview of the benefits of the OpenScout platform. Despite the fact that not all data repositories strictly follow Linked Data principles, OpenScout addressed individual variations in order to harvest, align, and provide a single end-point. In the end, OpenScout provides a full-fledged environment that leverages on the Linked Open Data available on the Web and additionally exposes it in an homogeneous format.

Open educational resources (OER) have a high potential to address the growing need for training materials in management education and training. Today, a high number of OER in management are already available in a large number of repositories. However, users face barriers as they have to search repository by repository with different interfaces to retrieve the appropriate learning content. In addition, the use of search criteria related to skills, such as learning objectives and skill-levels is not generally supported. The European co-funded project OpenScout addresses these barriers by intelligently connecting leading European OER repositories and providing federated, skill-based search and retrieval web services. On top of this content federation the project supports users with easy-to-apply tools that will accelerate the (re-) use of open content.

Already existing open educational resources in management have a high potential for enterprises to address the increasing training needs of their employees. However, access barriers still prevent the full exploitation of this potential. Users have to search a number of repositories with heterogeneous interfaces in order to retrieve the desired content. In addition, the use of search criteria related to skills, such as learning objectives and skill-levels is in most cases not supported. The demonstrator presented in this paper addresses these shortcomings by federating multiple repositories, integrating and enriching their metadata, and employing skill-based search for management related content.

Due to rapid and constant evolution of wireless communication technologies, standards, protocols, applications, and systems, it is hard to rely on personal experience to make their selection, design and deployment. Testing helps to determine actual performance and limitations of technologies. Testing is also important to avoid the financial and reputation losses of the company as well as to ensure uninterrupted flow of the information for essential services such as healthcare, airports, railways, and military services. Testing covers many aspects of a communications network, including interoperability, conformance, performance and availability. The end-to-end quality of service management implies that features such as service scalability between different networks have to be available. However, wireless QoS requirements are very diverse due to its seamless applications, and moreover, differences in QoS properties between both wired and wireless applications have a considerable effect on the level of user service quality as well as platform and application dimensions of network interoperability. The aim of this paper is to establish the network performance and availability requirements for the integrated use of satellite communication technology together with terrestrial network technology in a particular, niche application area, namely the seamless delivery of educational services in rural and remote areas. The suggested testing programme aims to identify the performance and availability issues for the operation of heterogeneous satellite-terrestrial network technologies.

By combining satellite and terrestrial (wireless) technologies, full coverage and high capacity can be achieved for true broadband services. The interoperability of such diverse networks imposes a number of challenges regarding service provision and management. The end-to-end quality of service (QoS) management implies that features such as service scalability between different networks have to be available. On the other hand, wireless QoS capabilities provide a promising diversity for a wide range of seamless applications. However, differences in QoS properties between both the wired and the wireless applications have a considerable effect on the quality level as well as platform and application dimensions of network interoperability. This paper examines the so-called interoperability requirements in integrated uses of satellite communication technology together with terrestrial (wireless) network technology for seamless delivery of broadband services (using ISABEL and CLIX e-learning applications) in rural and remote areas. This is demonstrated with an example of two educational, real-time and recorded, eLearning services.