Digital education has multiplied platforms, resources, and automated processes, but that does not necessarily mean it has multiplied the tools that help us think better. This is the starting point of Víctor Hugo Pérez Gallo’s study on SOCIOKAIROS, a heuristic environment designed to help social science students formulate and reformulate research problems.
Integrated directly into Moodle through a SCORM package, the system does not work like an artificial intelligence that delivers a finished answer: it analyses the structure of the problem, points out ambiguities, identifies variables, and requires students to reconsider their own methodological decisions. The difference is important. Whereas other tools allow users to delegate part of the reasoning process, SOCIOKAIROS seeks to turn technology into a form of productive friction.
The experience involved 218 students from universities in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, combining questionnaires, open-ended responses, and activity records generated automatically by Moodle. The data show a favourable reception: between 79% and 90% of students rated aspects such as usefulness, ease of use, and the system’s ability to help them structure their methodological thinking positively.
Perhaps more revealing, however, is what happened during the process itself: each student produced an average of 2.8 reformulations, and those who iterated more also tended to achieve higher scores within the environment. One suggestive expression appears repeatedly in the open-ended responses: the feeling of “thinking with support”. The tool seems to function less as a provider of solutions than as an interlocutor that returns questions, contradictions, and decisions that need to be justified.
This association should not, however, be turned into evidence of effectiveness that the study design cannot establish. There was no control group or pre-post measurement, the sample was purposive, and both novelty effects and social desirability may have influenced the results. The findings therefore demonstrate feasibility, acceptance, and patterns of use, rather than showing that SOCIOKAIROS itself causes transferable improvements in scientific thinking.
Its real interest may lie elsewhere: it proposes an idea of educational technology that runs almost counter to the obsession with saving time. Here, the system introduces pauses, forces students to return to what they have written, and makes their reasoning visible. At a time when much digital innovation promises to get us to the answer faster, SOCIOKAIROS explores what happens when we deliberately design a tool to slow that process down a little.
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How to Cite: Pérez Gallo, V. H. (2026). SOCIOKAIROS: A computational heuristic for reflexive teaching in distance university education. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 29(2), 257–285. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.47132
