Towards Agent-Enhanced Web-Based Education Systems Fuhua Lin (林复华), M. Ally, S. Leung Qin Li, R. McGreal Athabasca University (阿莎巴斯卡大学) Canada June 6-9, 2005 GCCCE 2005, Hawaii, USA

Web-based Education Systems rely on Learning Management Systems (LMS) WebCT (http://www.webct.com) Blackboard (http://www.blackboard.com/), Sakai (http://sakaiproject.org/), Moodle (http://moodle.org/). Their functions can be enhanced to help students learn and educators work more efficiently and better through automating some tasks.

Agent-Based Approach suitable for supporting learning since relationships among learners, courses, and instructors last for a considerable period of time (T-W, Chan, 1995). can reduce information workload and for automatically perform many knowledge/labour-intensive tasks for both learners and educators (Jim Greer, et al., 2001).

Software Agents help the user in different ways hide the complexity of difficult tasks perform some tasks on behalf of their users teach the users monitor events and procedures help the users collaborate and cooperate

Agents and their Environments User Preference/Profiles/Tasks Percepts Sensors Networked Agent Environment Actions Effecters Agent-Ready?

Agent-Ready Infrastructure One of the most important issues to be studied is that of building an appropriate infrastructure for the agents to roam the Web, while integrating them into the WBES seamlessly (Cost, et al., 2002).

Web Services A Web Service is any service that is available over the Internet, uses a standardized XML messaging system and is not tied to any one operating system or programming language (Cerami, 2002). Web Services technology is characterized by the use of standardized communication protocol, interoperability, and easy integration and development.

Web Services Technologies HTTP Web Service Web Service WSDL SOAP/HTTP HTTP Registry Web Service Web Service (UDDI) WSDL A Web Service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (WSDL) Other systems interact with the Web Service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP-message, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards. The Power of Web Services, in addition to their great interoperability and extensibility thanks to the use of XML, is that they can be combined in order to achieve complex operations Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) HTTP Web Service Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)

Integrating Agents with Web Services HTTP Web Service Web Service WSDL HTTP Registry Web Service Web Service WSDL A Web Service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (WSDL) Other systems interact with the Web Service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP-message, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards. The Power of Web Services, in addition to their great interoperability and extensibility thanks to the use of XML, is that they can be combined in order to achieve complex operations SOAP HTTP Agent Web Service

Application Example 1: eAdvisor Course selection Program planning Collaboration between universities Integration of educational services

Background to meet the students’ needs to reduce the workload of the advisors On behalf of the students’ advisors, the agent will assist them in generating up-to-date, personalized, and optimal study plans by constantly monitoring and utilizing related information resources.

Related Work Kay, Chen & Mizoguchi, have noted the advantage of using ontologies for learner/user models. Razmerita, et al., (2003) proposed a generic ontology-based user modeling architecture, OntobUM, based on the IMS LIP. Planning Advisor on curriculum and enrollment (Gunadhi, et al., 1995)

… University 2 University N Learner UI Learner Information Web Service Notification Web Service UI notify update Advisor/Registrar /Administrator Learner Information Web Service request delegate Scheduling Agent DB Monitoring Agent MSc IS Ontology Web Service Learner Data Base UI monitor Brokering Services delegate/ notify request/respond Course Schedule Web Service Course Schedule Web Service Program/Course Data Base Ontology Course Schedule Program/ … University 2 University N Program/Course Data Base

User Interface Thomas Chiu

Program Structure Represented by Petri Nets mandatory 1 5 COMP695 p11 COMP636 1 p20 p9 optional m 1 COMP605 p12 p28 p10 COMP617 p21 1 m 1 1 COMP602 p13 1 1 COMP667 p22 1 COMP696 m COMP603 p14 1 1 1 1 m COMP648 p23 p1 COMP504 p5 1 COMP697 m COMP607 p15 1 1 1 p16 COMP660 p24 p29 1 m COMP610 m p2 COMP503 p6 1 COMP689 p25 1 COMP698 1 m 1 1 p30 p3 COMP501 p7 1 1 p18 COMP641 p26 m COMP699 m p4 COMP601 p8 COMP604 p17 1 p19 COMP674 p27 p31 Foundation Core Career Track Electives Graduation Project/Thesis

Application Example 2: eCourseGuard

Application Example 2: eCourseGuard Notification Agent Student’s Personal Agent Instructor’s Personal Agent Learner Student Information Web Service Link Information Web Service Learning Object Recommendation Web Service Adaptive Scheduler Course Information Database Online Course Materials

Athabasca University Model The Athabasca University Model

‘Spider’ for Checking for Broken Links in a Web Page A ‘Spider’ is a specialized bot that is designed to seek out other sites based on the content found in a known site. ‘Spider’ for Checking for Broken Links in a Web Page

Intelligent & Focused ‘Spiders’ for Course Maintenance Capability to collect data and make decisions Capability of learning while crawling Capability of learning from the experience and lessons Focused: There is a short range topical locality on the Web.

Structure of Online Course Materials COMP610 Software Engineering Design Phase Implementation Class Diagrams Interaction Diagrams C++-based. Java-based External links <a href=http://www.yahoo.com>Yahoo!</a>

The Flow of URL States (Heaton, 2002) God link queue http://... URL complete URL found Waiting queue Running queue Broken link queue

‘Spider’-like Monitoring Agents Currently the Monitoring Agent for the course information Web Service is designed for monitoring online course material to determine whether or not the links in those pages are broken, determine whether or not the content in those pages have been significantly changed. The meaning of “broken” and “significantly changed” is based on a couple of pre-defined criteria. For examples, the number of hyperlinks or photos increased or decreased, or the content lengths of the Web page by examining its MIME header.

Learning-while-Crawling Learn while crawling: the spider gradually learns the linkage structure and the possibility of changing statistically as it progresses. Define an adaptive rules to determine the frequency of checking to increase the performance and the quality of service. Create a link database. Build more sophisticated text understanding capabilities.

The Interface

Conclusions - Educational information standardization, educational resource development, Web technologies, and AI technologies have paved a way for Agent-Enhanced On-line Learning.

Conclusions To integrate agents into existing LMSs, one may encounter many difficulties. Web Services technology provides a new way to integrate existing systems or applications, and the ability to access data in a heterogeneous environment and to provide interoperability of components and learning content. One of the main benefits of the proposed architecture is the reusability of the components (agent classes and Web Services) when we further develop other agents for I-WBES.

Future Work Knowledge Modeling for Adaptive Learning Environment: adaptive course generation, adaptive testing Agent Usability Web Service Reliability Semantic Web Services

Our Goal To design, implement, and evaluate with real users an innovative agent-supported on-line learning environment able to support learners during the whole cycle of the learning.

Thank You for Coming! Email: oscarl@athabascau.ca URL: http://io.acad.athabascau.ca/~oscar