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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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