The
proposal is about our agent-based e-learning environment for online
children education. The project includes three main elements: 1)
the multiple character agent system with inter-communicated agents
perform different roles in the learning process 2) the virtual community
among multiple learners and 3) usage of ontology to capture the
information of the learner and provide the e-learning contents.
These three elements work together to avoid the frustration and
tediousness with traditional e-learning and build the multiple agent
system for better e-learning environment.
In our
system, there are multiple kinds of agents, for instance, the partner
agent, the tutor agent and so on.. We use multiple agents instead
of a single agent is to make clear that each agent has different
roles thus better interact with children learners and cause less
confusion during the learning process. The internal status of the
agents is formed and changes during the learning process based on
the interactions of the learner and the learning environment to
describe the mental status of the learner. In the learning process,
our character agent will detect the learner’s personality in the
beginning and thus interact with different type of learners in different
ways. Teaching agents teach contents to learners, and study partner
interact with learners with the feedback from learners. For example,
it will explain the study materials for the current topic, give
hints if learner is very frustrated, make an alert or change learning
contents if learner has low concentration, and pick up the topic
which the student pays attention to, etc. Agents can also search
and communicate with the other agents.
In the second part, we use the multiple agents system to interact
among learners. The system should be a system for multiple users
in each interface for each individual user, there are multiple agents
having different roles . . In our project, Each learner owns an
agent, which monitor the internal status of the learner. Also agents
can build communities of character agents with their learner focusing
on the same learning topic can find each other and appear in the
e-learning content together forming a virtual class. Agents interact
with other learner’s agents and provide information according to
user’s incoming information. As we know that in the traditional
e-learning environment, learners are separated by both space and
time. Other than traditional ones, we proposed our concept of the
agent-based virtual communication which can communicate and form
virtual communities which does not need to care about the space
and time. Virtual community is a group of partner agents exhibited
to a learner. Every learner can find a virtual class fitting for
him, and the attendances of the class change as his learning topic
changes. That is, only the agent whose user has learnt the same
topic as current learner does will be added to the virtual class.
E-learning content is a user side framework of the e-learning environment,
where the teacher agent and character agent reside in. The partner
agent’s knowledge about its user is organized by ontology. We will
exploit the technique from the campaigns of both the agent communication
and the ontology based knowledge management.
The idea of this proposal is built on other past projects on
children online education (the Exploratory Software Project 2004).
With the interface on children education, the major problems of
frustrations and bad interaction ability on children online education
can be improved much.
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