EVA: an interactive Web-based collaborative learning environment
Introduction
The technological innovations on the one hand, and the growing popularity and availability of Internet on the other, are the main reasons of development in recent years of numerous applications and investigation projects in the field of technology-mediated education (Collis, 1999, O'Malley, 1995, Steed, 1999, Youngblut, 1994). The virtual teaching, integrating computer and communication technologies in different educational scenarios, is advocated as a solution to the problem of exponential growth of knowledge in the contemporary society. As a matter of fact, information technologies offer exciting opportunities to thoroughly redesign the education process and to achieve, among others, the following benefits: integration of means (text, audio, animation and video), access to big quantities of information, interactivity, personalized planning, individualized work rhythms and immediate answer to the apprentice's progress.
However, the introduction of new technologies in the real education environment is a difficult problem. For example, the relatively modern and quite common methods of teaching, such as videoconferences or on-line courses (as versions of textbooks) have not been very successful due to their limitations and to the negative facets that they contain, to mention some: weak integration of the means, weak interactivity among student, professor and the system, dominant paradigm of knowledge transmission, separation of the apprentices from the cooperative activities in the learning scenarios. Therefore, the intense search of new pedagogic solutions and teaching/learning strategies is a time challenge, where the advanced information technologies play the main role.
The EVA project is dedicated to the development and implementation of a software learning environment, personalized and collaborative, by means of which different academic and administrative activities can be offered in a distance manner to the students of different institutions and public and private companies (Guzman and Nunez, 1998, Nunez et al., 1998). This project has been developed in the Agents Laboratory of the Center for Computing Research of the National Technical Institute of Mexico (AgLab, 2001). As a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), EVA applies the methodology and tools of Distance Learning (DL), Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), Interactive Learning Environments (ILE), and Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) systems to obtain a new paradigm of the Automatic Configurable Distance Education, which we have named EVA (Espacios Virtuales de Aprendizaje in Spanish—Virtual Learning Spaces). This concept does not pretend to substitute a human tutor by an intelligent software system with one-on-one tutoring model, but tries to use the ITS technology to accomplish with some rudimentary tasks and to enhance students systematically. As in an ILE, the intelligence invested in EVA is distributed across a range of tools rather than centralized in a tutor, but the proposed methodology does not use the basic principle of the ILE—it does not permit students investigate and learn topics absolutely free of external control. It also differs from the concept of Virtual University, introducing the artificial intelligence and interactivity in the VLE. The EVA philosophy is congruent with the existing classroom practice: it mainly aims at learning goals and outcomes that are already embedded in traditional curricula, it does not neglect the use of conventional learning materials, and can usually be plugged into existing curricula with minimal change to course plans. It benefits from some explicit representation of the topics that students study, but it does not need to be omniscient. Further, since EVA does not attempt to tutor, it is free of obligations to model explicitly students' cognition and to make complex pedagogical decisions.
At the first phase of our project, the kernel of the EVA environment as a Course Management System (CMS) was developed. At the second stage, a number of multiagent systems has been developed to extend the functionality of traditional CMS with a group of intelligent functions. The rest of the article has the following structure. In the next section, the state of the art of distance education in Mexico is briefly discussed. In Section 3, EVA conceptual architecture and the main underlying concepts are presented. In Section 4, implementation of EVA software architecture is discussed. Multiagent virtual learning community is introduced in Section 5. Development technologies and tools in EVA are described in Section 6. Finally, current applications of EVA environment, conclusions and future work directions are discussed.
Section snippets
Distance education in Mexico
In developing countries like Mexico, there are not enough resources (specially qualified people) to deliver high-quality education in advanced technology fields, such as Computer Science. For instance, the country has perhaps 150 Computer Science specialists with a PhD degree; half are working in Industry. This, for a population of 140,000 undergraduate students and 2000 graduate students in Computer Science. Low salaries and scanty resources in public university, plus excessive bureaucracy,
Conceptual architecture of EVA
EVA is a learning paradigm that considers different forms of acquiring, transmitting and exchanging knowledge among people and work groups that do not usually have physical access to the conventional sources of knowledge: books, magazines, schools, universities, laboratories, libraries, good professors, etc. EVA constitutes a conception of the WBE that uses advanced information technologies like, for instance: JAVA servlets and applets, Agents, Artificial Intelligence, Groupware, Multimedia and
EVA platform
When a study plan is successfully generated for an EVAnaut, they can start their learning activities in the EVA environment. To customize the learning spaces for each user, we have adopted the technology of dynamic and interactive pages using servlets, applets and agents (Sheremetov and Nunez, 1999a, Sheremetov and Quintero, 2001). Servlets implement the basic functionality of a CMS. The dynamic Web documents are created by the server when they are requested by some client. When a query
Agents in EVA for smart personal assistance
The notion of agent is the central part of contemporary learning environments, where they act as virtual tutors, virtual students or learning companions, virtual personal assistants that help students to learn, mine information, manage and schedule their learning activities (Chan, 1996, Gordon and Hall, 1998, Muller et al., 1997). The purpose of these functions is to improve the efficiency of learning based on adaptation of learning materials and activities to the abilities and preferences of a
Development technologies and tools in EVA
The EVA project is also composed of a number of authoring tools for virtual teaching and learning according to the EVA methodology. The main authoring systems include:
- 1.
Visual environment for the development of the POLIlibros: an auxiliary tool facilitating the development of learning materials, their labeling and packaging which is developed in collaboration with CENIDET, Mexico (Fig. 10). This tool permits a domain expert to create a POLIlibro (in a generalized form) in a user-friendly visual
Current experiments and conclusions
EVA is a rich learning environment with the following innovative characteristics:
- 1.
It considers in an integrated manner all the methods and channels, by means of which students acquire information and communicate to learn, to exchange knowledge, to solve problems, to experiment and, in general, to realize academic activities.
- 2.
It also contemplates the development of the environment capable of delivering to the user in an integrated and virtual way the main services, work and entertainment spaces
Acknowledgements
The EVA project is the effort of many people. The authors would particularly like to thank their colleagues and students of the Agents Laboratory for their determination and contribution of ideas and talent to EVA programming. This work was supported in part by REDII CONACyT and CGEPI IPN, Mexico.
References (31)
Finding the main themes in a Spanish document
Journal Expert Systems with Applications
(1998)- et al.
Virtual learning spaces in distance education: tools for the Eva project [Special Issue]
International Journal Expert Systems with Applications
(1998) - ACM. (1991). Computing as a discipline. ACM...
- ActiveX® technology for interactive software agents. 1998. October, Microsoft Corporation. Available:...
- Advanced Distribuited Learning Co-Lab. (2001). Available:...
- Agents Laboratory, CIC-IPN. Home Page. (2001). Available:...
Learning companion systems, social learning systems, and intelligent virtual classroom
Proc. of the World Congress on AI in Education
(1996)Applications of computer communications in education: an overview
IEEE Communications Magazine
(1999)- Dillenbourg, P., Jermann, P., Schneider, D., Traum, D., & Buiu, C. (1997). The design of MOO agents: implementations...
- Finin, T., Labrou, Ya., & Mayfield J. (1997) KQML as an agent communication language. In J. Bradshaw, (Ed.), Software...
Cited by (65)
Fuzzy and MultiAgent Instructional Planner for an Intelligent Tutorial System
2011, Applied Soft Computing JournalCitation Excerpt :The use of a MultiAgent System, on the other hand, offers a great advantage in applications that are able to use distributed computing since the ability to divide tasks provides modularity and flexibility while reducing computing time [7,8]. Incorporating this technique into the ITS improves the objective learning strategy while at the same time decreasing the wait time in interacting with the user [9]. This paper is organized as follows.
The Impact of Intelligent Pedagogical Agents’ Interventions on Student Behavior and Performance in Open-Ended Game Design Environments
2023, ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent SystemsDesigning PairBuddy-A Conversational Agent for Pair Programming
2022, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionAn Intelligent Pedagogical Agent to Foster Computational Thinking in Open-Ended Game Design Activities
2022, International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Proceedings IUIOpen Distance Learning: Fundamentals, Developments, and Modelling
2022, Open Distance Learning: Fundamentals, Developments, and ModellingOptimal Design of Language Teaching Strategy System Based on Smart Video Mode
2022, Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience