1. 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

2. Web-based Education Systems
rely on Learning Management Systems (LMS)
WebCT (
Blackboard ( Sakai (
Moodle (
Their functions can be enhanced to help students learn and educators work more efficiently and better through automating some tasks.

3. 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).

4. 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

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

6. 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).

7. 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.

8. 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)

9. 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

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

11. 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.

12. 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)

13. … 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

14. User Interface
Thomas Chiu

15. 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

17. Application Example 2: eCourseGuard

18. 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

19. Athabasca University Model
The Athabasca University Model

20. ‘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

21. 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.

22. Structure of Online Course Materials
COMP610 Software Engineering
Design Phase
Implementation
Class Diagrams
Interaction
Diagrams
C++-based.
Java-based
External links
<a href=

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

24. ‘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.

25. 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.

26. The Interface

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

28. 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.

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

30. 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.

31. Thank You for Coming!
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