Presentation by Vlado Glavinic at the 1st World Summit of the Open Knowledge Society, Athens, 24-26 September 2008. Track: Knowledge, Learning, Education, Learning Technologies, and eLearning for the Knowledge Society.
eLearning systems used to be very static (HTML), interactivity increased (ASP, JSP, PHP) and applications based on Service Oriented Architecture (J2EE, .NET, XML) arise. Semantic Web allows cooperative work among agents based on displaying relations among knowledge elements and inference rules on data (OWL, DAML). Web 2.0 focus on cooperation, sharing, and creativity. Both affect the conceptualization of any web-oriented knowledge-based system.
The tool (TEx-Sys) presented arose from an on-site version, to web-oriented version, and finally to a web service based version. Transformation of the intelligent tutoring to the new web generation faces some challenges: heterogeneity of users, information overload, interoperability between systems, heterogeneity of access devices. So we need a new pedagogical paradigm to address the new learning community: So TEx-Sys is transformed into a multi-agent system. Agents should adapt to each students, model a student profile (learning background, previous test results, capabilities, preferences, learning goals …), agents can suggest students a revision of previous lessons, an exercise, a related test. Agent have knowledge on the domain, teaching methods. Agents shall enable communication between users, form interest groups, support cooperative learning etc. System allows teachers to enrich teaching content with further resources, student to download students notes. Agents provide search to reduce information overload of students (based on the student profile). A module of the system allows the use of mobile devices: This allows easy, contextualized, and ubiquitous access to knowledge.
The presented work is a vision paper listing requirements for a suited intelligent tutoring system. A first prototype exists and needs to be adapted to the new web generation, to the new agent-based framework. The knowledge society aims at commercializing ideas of such intelligent systems. Intelligent Agent-based system are still not ready for commercialization;most systems are research prototypes.