2. Agents for Maintaining On-line Learning Course Materials IEA/AIE 2004, Ottawa, Canada, May 19, 2004 Fuhua Lin Lawrence Poon Computing and Information Systems Athabasca, Alberta, Canada http://www.athabascau.ca

3. USA Vancouver Canada Ottawa Alberta Province Alberta

4. Athabasca

5. Athabasca University

6. Outline Introduction The Proposed Architecture Implementation Conclusions and Future Work

7. Trends in Online Learning Active Learning Student-Centred Service-Oriented

8. Anywhere, Any time, Anyone. Athabasca University Promises... Flexibility Interactivity Customization

9. A Challenge A Solution Hi, I am your new agent.

10. Agent's Roles in e-Learning On-site and real-time monitoring Information filtering and recommendation Enhance, manage, maintain, and peronalize e-learning content and LMSs Give help, advice, feedback Act as a peer learning Participate in assessments Participate in interaction, simulation Adapt to learners' background and preferences, devices, learning styles

11. Modelling Distributed Learning Environments: IEEE’s Learning Technology Systems Architecture (2001) Learner Entity Coach DeliveryEvaluation Learning Resources Learner Records MultimediaBehaviour Interaction Context Catalog Info Query (history) Performance/ Preferences (new) Performance (current) Assessment Learning Content Locator Learning Preferences http://ltsc.ieee.org/

12. Athabasca University Model The Athabasca University Model

13. ‘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.

14. Intelligent & Focused ‘Spiders’ for Course Maintenance ● Intelligent: – 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.

15. Structure of Online Course Materials COMP610 Software Engineering ImplementationDesign Phase Interaction Diagrams Class Diagrams Java-basedC++-based. Yahoo! http://www.yahoo.com External links

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

17. ‘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.

18. 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.

19. Learner/ Instructor Info. Web Service Agent platform Course Information Web Service Agent platform Advisor Agent Performance Monitoring Agent Tutoring/FAQ Agent Course Planning Agent Notification Agent Course Delivery Agent Course Update Agent Testing Agent Service Registry Learning Object Repository Web Service Ontology Web Service Web Services Student PA Instructor PA Agent Management and Deployment Service Course Web pages Collaboration Agent Learning Object Recommendation Agent Notification Agent The Proposed Architecture

20. Learner/ Instructor Info. Web Service Web Services Course Information Web Service Service Registry learning object Repository Web Service Ontology Web Service Distributed Knowledge Systems Architecture

21. From Document Web to Semantic Web Document Web Application Web Services Web Semantic Web

22. Web Services Technologies Characteristics - Standardized communication protocol - Interoperability - Easy integration and deployment Web Services are excellent complimentary partners with agents in on-line learning environments.

23. Learner/ Instructor Info. Web Service Course Information Web Service Service Registry learning object Repository Web Service Ontology Web Service Performance Monitoring Agent Agent-supported Web Services Test/exam Agent

24. Learning Objects Repository Web Service (eduSource, Canada) - Storing Learning Objects (LOs ) - Tagging Learning Objects - Personalized Search - Learning Object Recommendation Service - Learning Object Update Notification Web Service

25. Configuring User Agents - The user configures/updates the user agent’s settings (turn on/off, vacation notice)

26. Course Maintenance Agent (e.g. Broken Link Checking, Link Maintenance, Update Notification) Learner/ Instructor Info. Web Service Learner’s Personal Agent platform Course Information Web Service Instructor’s Personal Agent platform Notification Agent Course Update Agent Service Registry Web Services Student PA Instructor PA Course Web pages Notification Agent Delegate

27. Student Information Web Service Learner Instructor’s Personal Agent Online Course Material Maintenance Link Information Web Service Online Course Materials Notification Agent Adaptive Scheduler Learning Object Recommendati on Web Service Student’ s Persona l Agent Course Information Database

28. Broken Links for Athabasca University Digital Reading Room (DRR) ● 140 Online Courses ● 30, 000 learning objects

29. CCIS Course Material Monitoring Agent Environment: Java SE v2 (JDK 1.4.2), Apache 2.0.47, MySQL 4.0.14 and PHP 4.3.3 Red Hat Linux 8.0 Tasks: 1. to download (by executing a shell script download.sh) CCIS on-line course materials from AU and unzip into the directory /home/dean/download. Downloading is automatically done each day through a cron job 2. to check broken links (by the spider) and write the results into MySQL databases.

30. Deltas registry UDDI Registry WDSL document User GUI SOAP parser Apache Tomcat Developer Apache Axis Task Agents Dispatcher SOAP response body Registers Downloads Queries Programs Discovers SOAP request enclosed in HTTP SOAP response enclosed in HTTP Programs Web Service Server DELTA UDDI Registry UDDI replication message User Agent Deltas Agent Platform FIPA ACL request SOAP request SOAP response SOAP body SOAP response body FIPA ACL reply

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

32. Conclusions (con't) - To integrate agents into existing legacy learning environments or into heterogeneous learning environments, one may encounter many difficulties.

33. Future Work Scalability issues 'Spider'-like agents on Semantic Web Web Services and Agents Integration for U-Portal

34. 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.

35. http://www.athabascau.ca