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2. Pedagogical agents
Orlando Belo
Agent-based computing is not a recent area of research and technological development (Wooldridge
1998) (Jennings 1999). A lot of work and applications were made for a large diversity of domains
(Jennings & Wooldridge 1998). The agent paradigm is by nature quite attractive inspiring researchers
from many distinct application arenas. During the last few years, agents have been introduced in a
large range of applications, ranging from financial markets to medical services, passing by
telecommunications, retail, or transports. Today, we can find agents doing a lot of tasks, 24 hours a
day, 365 day a year, without interruptions.
In a few set of links, a simple Web search reveals us that eLearning is no exception in the adoption of
agent-based technology (Nedev & Nedeva 2008) (Gregg 2007) (Kazar & Bahi 2009). Intelligent or
not, agents have been developing important roles in the eLearning arena, improving effectiveness of
educational games (Conati & Zhao 2004), done procedural training in virtual environments (Jonhson
& Rickel 1997), supporting distance education (Silveira & Vicari 2002), animating educational
sessions (Nunes et al. 2002) (Lester et al. 1997), doing virtual tutorship (Remondino 2007), retrieving
selective information from the web or other information sources (Pankratius et al 2004), or managing
processes in eLearning environments (Lai et al. 2008). This is only a brief panorama of what we can
find about agents in eLearning environments.
Pedagogical agents could be seen today as good alternatives to some parts of the educational
process, being very useful in the formative process of students. Some of the most experienced
eLearning solutions integrate now in some way “expert” software components, especially in areas
where attendance services must be ensured continuously, 24 hours per day. Pedagogical agents are
designed and implemented with the goal to support students in their daily work, providing information
about their classes, supporting studying processes, accessing, or retrieving pertinent information
about some topics. Basically, they intend to improve students learning outcomes. Thus, we can see
that this particular kind of agents have the ability to attenuate several usage restrictions and user
services limitations that we can find normally in eLearning platforms (Brusilovsky 2000) (Zhang et al.
2004).
One of the most sophisticated aspects that we are particularly interested to explore is customization
(namely frequently by personalization) of eLearning processes and services (Allison et al. 2005).
Trying to go towards the needs of students, providing the learning materials they need and
complement them with other resources in anticipation it’s a clear goal for us. The use of profiling
techniques (Marques & Belo 2010) to establish a standard modus operandi of the student and predict
what students will need and use are quite important for eLearning services personalization (Paneva
and Zhelev 2007). This allows to catch individual studying styles and resources options used,
especially the ones concerning about bibliographic references support – the goal of this work –,
personalizing them and creating more student oriented learning objectives and material support. In
the following sections we will see how we used agent technology to design and develop a
bibliographic resource assistant, with the ability to follow studying sessions, receiving reference
requests about some particular studying topic, and suggesting on the fly a set of references that could
help students and contribute to the improvement of knowledge acquisition and, as referred before, of
learning outcomes.
3. A bibliographic resource assistant
3.1 Overview
Students are very critical and demanding about bibliographic resources. They never are satisfied with
teachers’ proposals and suggestions concerning with what they must or need to read about some
course’s programme topic. Today, we have strong reasons to believe that a significant part of the
students’ failures is due to their inability to select appropriated bibliographic resources and use it.
Teachers use to indicate in every beginning of a scholar year at least one bibliographic list covering
the topics they approach in classes. Some of them even try to explain for each entry presented in the
lists its coverage and importance. But it seems that such efforts are useless so many times.
In order to attenuate such problem we design a small software component especially oriented to
assist and help students during their working sessions. It wasn’t our intention to conceive a generic
assistant. However all the pointed development lines followed here could be used in such direction.
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