Personal Assistant Autonomous Agents for Intelligent e-Learning Systems

Abstract

The increasing use of e-learning systems and the broader target audience imply the use of new techniques that allow Open Distance Learning systems to automatically adapt to the profile of each user. Only this way contents can be tailored to the students needs and a personalized teaching environment created. However, adaptation to the students needs is not sufficient to create on the student a real motivation a felling of integration that is characteristic of traditional teaching environments. Communication with other students and with tutors is essential for the students integration on a cooperative learning community that motivates him to go further and overtake his natural limits. In this paper we present a multi-agent based architecture for distant learning that supports the presentation of the course materials and the managing of information about students and tutors with the goal of automatically adapt course presentation and contents to the user profile. A special attention is given to the Learners Personal Agent that is the responsible for the students profile acquisition and for managing the communications between students and tutors. A methodology for the creation of dynamic questionnaires based on traditional ones is presented and preliminary results are discussed.