Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Assessing a Collaborative Online Environment for Music Composition

The current pilot study tested the effectiveness of an e-learning environment built to enable students to compose music collaboratively. The participants interacted online by using synchronous and asynchronous resources to develop a project in which they composed a new music piece in collaboration. After the learning sessions, individual semi-structured interviews with the participants were conducted to analyze the participants\u2019 perspectives regarding the e-learning environment\u2019s functionality, the resources of the e-learning platform, and their overall experience with the e-learning process. Qualitative analyses of forum discussions with respect to metacognitive dimensions, and semi-structured interview transcriptions were performed. The findings showed that the participants successfully completed the composition task in the virtual environment, and that they demonstrated the use of metacognitive processes. Moreover, four themes were apparent in the semi-structured interview transcriptions: Teamwork, the platform, face-to-face/online differences, and strengths/weaknesses. Overall, the participants exhibited an awareness of the potential of the online tools, and the task performed. The results are discussed in consideration of metacognitive processes, and the following aspects that rendered virtual activity effective for learning: The learning environment, the platform, the technological resources, the level of challenge, and the nature of the activity. The possible implications of the findings for research on online collaborative composition are also considered

Teaching the future marketers through experiential client-based projects : marketing knowledge and skills in the context of early phases of service and product development

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Linking development of skills and perceptions of employability: the case of Erasmus students

There is evidence that perceptions of employability lead to positive results for organizations and individuals alike. The relationship between perceptions of employability and development of skills is, although relevant, an understudied area of research. This study analyses this relationship in a sample of 196 students who participated in the Erasmus program between 2013 and 2017. Using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we analyse how configurations of five types of skills (Career-orientation skills, Adaptability skills, Managerial skills, Personal skills and Teamwork skills) combine to produce perceptions of employability. Results show that, although Erasmus students perceive a positive development in all groups of skills, students perceive a higher development on Adaptability skills. Results also show that there is no single type of skills that can be developed to promote perceptions of employability but, instead, there are two distinct configurational groupings of skills that lead to perceptions of employability: one configuration has two core conditions— Adaptability skills and Teamwork skills—and the other configuration includes three core conditions—Career-orientation skills, Managerial skills and Personal skills. These configurations match the two main motivations for choosing an international exchange as a strategy to enhance employability: pursuing an international career and pursuing distinction from peer

Team Achievements Equality Using Fuzzy Rule-based Technique

Team formation is important in industrial and academic institutions because the success of teams depend on assembling the right combination of team members.Prior academic achievement is one of the factors that affect teams’ performances.Therefore, it is important to identify an effective technique that can determine equality amongst teams based on prior academic achievements.Having team with similar prior academic achievements can increase equality, reliability and validity in team formation before embarking on any research studies.This can be achieved by applying fuzzy rule-based technique.Fuzzy rule-based technique is suitable for this study because this technique allow analyzing of imprecise data and classifying selected criteria.Initial evaluation of this technique showed that it can indicate whether every team has equal distribution of prior academic achievements.By incorporating this technique in a team formation model, each team can be guaranteed to have equal chances to perform effectively.This technique can facilitate decision makers when forming highly productive project teams

Gap Quality of Employee Attendance System Application Using Technology Acceptance Model Approach and Fuzzy

The employee attendance system application in an educational institution occupies an important role in providing evaluation and improving performance in addition to being able to improve the transparency of employee and institutional relations. In its use, the employee attendance system must be able to accommodate the needs of its users, namely employees and staffing. This research evaluates user satisfaction over system applications using the Technology Acceptance Model approach. The evaluation was conducted by assessing the level of perception and satisfaction level of 40 users, in this case, employees. The research variable used is perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use (level of ease of use received), and user satisfaction (level of user satisfaction). Computing process was done by fuzzy methods. The results showed that some quality of the application could not meet the expectations of employees at this time. The only variable that met the performance and expectation was perceived ease

Knowledge, skills and beetles: respecting the privacy of private experiences in medical education

In medical education, we assess knowledge, skills, and a third category usually called values or attitudes. While knowledge and skills can be assessed, this third category consists of ‘beetles’, after the philosopher Wittgenstein’s beetle-in-a-box analogy. The analogy demonstrates that private experiences such as pain and hunger are inaccessible to the public, and that we cannot know whether we all experience them in the same way. In this paper, we claim that unlike knowledge and skills, private experiences of medical learners cannot be objectively measured, assessed, or directly accessed in any way. If we try to do this anyway, we risk reducing them to knowledge and skills—thereby making curriculum design choices based on what can be measured rather than what is valuable education, and rewarding zombie-like student behaviour rather than authentic development. We conclude that we should no longer use the model of representation to assess attitudes, emotions, empathy, and other beetles. This amounts to, first of all, shutting the

An intelligent framework for monitoring student performance using fuzzy rule-based linguistic summarisation

Monitoring students' activity and performance is vital to enable educators to provide effective teaching and learning in order to better engage students with the subject and improve their understanding of the material being taught. We describe the use of a fuzzy Linguistic Summarisation (LS) technique for extracting linguistically interpretable scaled fuzzy weighted rules from student data describing prominent relationships between activity / engagement characteristics and achieved performance. We propose an intelligent framework for monitoring individual or group performance during activity and problem based learning tasks. The system can be used to more effectively evaluate new teaching approaches and methodologies, identify weaknesses and provide more personalised feedback on learner's progress. We present a case study and initial experiments in which we apply the fuzzy LS technique for analysing the effectiveness of using a Group Performance Model (GPM) to deploy Activity Led Learning (ALL) in a Master-level module. Results show that the fuzzy weighted rules can identify useful relationships between student engagement and performance providing a mechanism allowing educators to transparently evaluate teaching and factors effecting student performance, which can be incorporated as part of an automated intelligent analysis and feedback system