Dear colleagues, is a great pleasure for me to be invited to give this Laudatio for my colleague and very good friend, Prof. Dr. Carlos Delgado Kloos. He is an engineer and educator; his area of expertise is jointly over Computer Science and Telecom Engineering, but in his professional life there always has been a strong connection between Education and Engineering, where Dr. Delgado Kloos and I used to meet in several projects, conferences, events, associations, all life ahead. His doctoral degree is in Engineering; more specifically in Computer Science, working for the PhD under the supervision of Prof. Friedrich Ludwig Bauer, one of the pioneers of Computer Science in Germany.
Only a few words to introduce my relationship with Prof. Dr. Carlos Delgado Kloos. I am Manuel Castro, Fellow and Past Director of the Division VI of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering), President Emeritus of the IEEE Education Society, and Professor at the UNED (Spanish University of Distance Education). I have a long term relation with Dr. Delgado Kloos. I met him for the first time in the twentieth century, in 1998. At this moment he was the Manager of the Spanish Plan for Research and Development, concretely managing the research projects in ICT. I attended some meetings of project development under the Spanish Plan as I was finishing my last project under the coordination of my mentor, Prof. Juan Peire, and I was starting to organize my first coordinated project. Dr. Delgado Kloos’s guidance and brilliant leading brought to the Spanish Agency a new vision of project development as well as allowing to enter in this coordination arena to a new bunch of new leaders and coordinators, where I was included. Let’s move to the 21st century and at to 2005. Then, we collaborated in one of the more complex projects, MosaicLearning, a six Spanish partners project starting a new collaboration vision in Spanish projects, following the principles of European and worldwide synergetic projects. We might summarize we have more than 25 years of friendship, professional activities, and synergy.
Prof. Dr. Carlos Delgado Kloos studied Telecommunications Engineering at the Technical University of Madrid. When he finished, he went to the Technical University of Munich to complete a Master’s degree program and a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1986 (as well as PhD in Telecommunications Engineering at the Technical University of Madrid). After the time in Munich, he came back to Madrid to the Technical University of Madrid, where he became an Associate Professor in 1987. He went further to the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid to become Full Professor when the undergraduate program of Telecommunications Engineering was set up in 1996. His duty was to build up the knowledge area of Telematics Engineering. He was Vice-Dean for Telecommunications Engineering at the School of Engineering in 1997 and the founding Head of the Department of Telematics Engineering in 2001. Soon after that, he served first as Associate Vice Rector for International Relations and Cooperation for one 4-year term in 2007 and then as Vice Rector for Infrastructures and Environment for another 4-year term in 2011 both with Rector Daniel Peña. During the last 8 years since 2015, he has been Vice Rector for Strategy and Digital Education with Rector Juan Romo. He starts to serve in 2023 with Rector Angel Arias as Rector’s Delegate for Digital Microcredentials.
On top of his service activities, he has had a very rich and fruitful research work. His first area of research has been the application of formal methods to the description of electronic circuits. However, he has always had interests at the application of ICT in Education. For more than a quarter of a century now he has been leading projects on Educational Technology. These projects have been on topics like learning analytics, MOOCs, SPOCs and flipped classroom, blended learning, mixed reality, digital microcredentials, Artificial Intelligence in education, among others. The projects have received regional, national, European, bilateral funding from competitive calls as well as funding from companies. The number of publications in journals and conferences exceeds 500. According to Google Scholar, he has received more than 12,500 citations and has an h-index of 53 as well as an i10-index of 206. He has served in multiple positions in dozens of conferences being part of the organizing committees of EMOOCs (European MOOCs Stakeholders Summit) and ECTEL (European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning). He is Senior Member of IEEE and received the Silver Core from IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing).
From the teaching perspective, he has received numerous recognitions at his university for the quality of his teaching. He has been an innovator in this respect. He was one of the early adopters of teaching Java in the University in 1997, and among many other MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) he has authored, he has produced a series of three MOOCs on Introduction to Java Programming for edX, which has received over 620.000 registrations so far. This MOOC has been the basis for a SPOC (Small Private Online Course) that accompanies the course he teaches at the university. The students love to have this additional multimedia content for their learning. He was recognized by the Open Education Consortium (OE Global) as the winner of the Practitioner Award in 2019.
He is member since 2018 of the IEEE LWMOOCS Steering Committee. He received the IEEE LWMOOCS 2020 Meritorious Service Award and the IEEE LWMOOCS 2020 Best Lightning Speaker Award and the IEEE EDUCON 2022 Meritorious Service Award.
The professional life of Dr. Delgado Kloos has been very international. Apart from spending 7 years in Munich, he has spent one sabbatical year at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and did other research stays at Harvard University in the USA and at the German Universities of Passau, Augsburg, and Munich (LMU, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich). He has coordinated several international projects with Latin America and with South-East Asia. He has been a member of Editorial Boards of several journals (Springer Formal Aspects of Computing, IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, Novática, Revista de Contratación Electrónica) and Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the .LRN Consortium. He has been the holder of the Nokia chair for 9 years in two periods since 2002 and is the holder of the UNESCO Chair “Scalable Digital Education for All” since November 2013.
And as quality criteria, Dr. Delgado Kloos was granted a positive evaluation of 6 six-year research periods (maximum number that can be achieved), 1 six-year transfer period (maximum one), 6 five-year teaching periods (maximum number), positive evaluation on all the specific complements, as well as other Awards obtained, and the leadership in all his University and Department accreditation degrees and Masters. And finally to show his leadership capacity I would like to focus on the e-Madrid project, the excellence network of research and development of Education Technology, being integrated of six Public Universities of the Madrid Autonomous Community (Carlos III University of Madrid, Technical University of Madrid, Autonomous University of Madrid, Juan Carlos I University, Complutense University of Madrid and Spanish University of Distance Education), starting in 2010 with three grants in a row (2010, 2014 and 2019 with a budget larger than 2 million euros, more than 200 researchers involved and more than 1,000 papers and articles referenced), waiting now to a new call to present a new proposal. On those years we have more than 80 seminars, 300 speakers and 12 3-days workshops.
Dear colleagues, based upon Dr. Delgado Kloos’s quest to increase educator’s expertise in education through the creation of conferences, keynote speeches, contributions, research and projects, accomplishments, and dedication, Dr. Delgado Kloos has been selected to receive the IGIP Nikola Tesla Chain.
Please join me in recognizing Dr. Carlos Delgado Kloos’s dedication to our Engineering Education technical area, as well as IGIP’s areas of interest.
Thank you very much.
Prof. Dr. Manuel Castro
UNED
IEEE Fellow and President Emeritus of the IEEE Education Society
Consultative Status with UNESCO