Cultivating intelligent tutoring cognizing agents in ill-defined domains using hybrid approaches

Cognizing agents are those systems that can perceive information from the external environment and can adapt to the changing conditions of that environment. Along the adaptation process a cognizing agent perceives information about the environment and generates reactions. An intelligent tutoring cognizing agent should deal not only with the tutoring system’s world but also with the learner-it should infer and predict new information about the learner and tailor the learning process to fit this specific learner. This paper shows how intelligent tutoring cognizing agents can be cultivated in ill-defined domains using hybrid techniques instantiated in the two example agents AEINS-CA and ALES-CA. These agents offer adaptive learning process and personalized feedback aiming to transfer certain cognitive skills, such as problem solving skills to the learners and develop their reasoning in the two ill-defined domains of ethics and argumentation. The paper focuses on the internal structure of each agent and the reasoning methodology, in which, the cognizing agent administration and construction along with the pedagogical scenarios are described

System Design and Architecture of an Online, Adaptive, and Personalized Learning Platform

The authors propose that personalized learning can be brought to traditional and nontraditional learners through a new type of asynchronous learning platform called Guided Learning Pathways (GLP). The GLP platform allows learners to intelligently traverse a vast field of learning resources, emphasizing content only of direct relevance to the learner and presenting it in a way that matches the learner’s pedagogical preference and contextual interests. GLP allows learners to advance towards individual learning goals at their own pace, with learning materials catered to each learner’s interests and motivations. Learning communities would support learners moving through similar topics. This report describes the software system design and architecture required to support Guided Learning Pathways. The authors provide detailed information on eight software applications within GLP, including specific learning benefits and features of each. These applications include content maps, learning nuggets, and nugget recommendation algorithms. A learner scenario helps readers visualize the functionality of the platform. To describe the platform’s software architecture, the authors provide conceptual data models, process flow models, and service group definitions. This report also provides a discussion on the potential social impact of GLP in two areas: higher education institutions and the broader economy

e-Learning, e-Practising and e-Tutoring: an Integrated Approach

In this paper is described a didactic methodology combining current e-learning methods and the support of Intelligent Agents technologies. The aim is to favor the synthesis among theoretical approach and based practical approach using the so-called Intelligent Agent, software that exploits the Artificial Intelligence and that operates as tutor, facilitating the consumers in the training operations. The paper illustrates how such new Intelligent Agent algorithm (IA) is used in the training of employees working in the transportation sector, thanks to the experience gained with the PARMENIDE project - Promoting Advanced Resources and Methodologies for New Teaching and Learning Solutions in Digital Education

Layered evaluation of interactive adaptive systems : framework and formative methods

Peer reviewedPostprin

A Literature Review on Intelligent Services Applied to Distance Learning

Distance learning has assumed a relevant role in the educational scenario. The use of Virtual Learning Environments contributes to obtaining a substantial amount of educational data. In this sense, the analyzed data generate knowledge used by institutions to assist managers and professors in strategic planning and teaching. The discovery of students’ behaviors enables a wide variety of intelligent services for assisting in the learning process. This article presents a literature review in order to identify the intelligent services applied in distance learning. The research covers the period from January 2010 to May 2021. The initial search found 1316 articles, among which 51 were selected for further studies. Considering the selected articles, 33% (17/51) focus on learning systems, 35% (18/51) propose recommendation systems, 26% (13/51) approach predictive systems or models, and 6% (3/51) use assessment tools. This review allowed for the observation that the principal services offered are recommendation systems and learning systems. In these services, the analysis of student profiles stands out to identify patterns of behavior, detect low performance, and identify probabilities of dropouts from courses.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Human-AI Collaboration for Smart Education: Reframing Applied Learning to Support Metacognition

This chapter investigates the profound influence of intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) on the educational domain, specifically in the realm of individualized learning and the instruction of writing abilities and content creation. IVAs, incorporating generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, hold the potential to bring about a paradigm shift in educational programs, emphasizing the enhancement of advanced metacognitive capacities rather than the fundamentals of communication. The subsequent recommendations stress the need to cultivate enduring proficiencies and ascertain tailored learning approaches for each learner, which will be indispensable for success in the evolving job market. In this context, prompt engineering is emerging as a vital competency, while continuous reskilling and lifelong learning become professional requisites. The proposed innovative method for teaching writing skills and content generation advocates for a reconfiguration of curricula to concentrate on applied learning techniques that accentuate the value of contextual judgment as a central pedagogical tenet and the mastery of sophisticated metacognitive abilities, which will be pivotal in the future of work

THE ROLE OF SIMULATION IN SUPPORTING LONGER-TERM LEARNING AND MENTORING WITH TECHNOLOGY

Mentoring is an important part of professional development and longer-term learning. The nature of longer-term mentoring contexts means that designing, developing, and testing adaptive learning sys-tems for use in this kind of context would be very costly as it would require substantial amounts of fi-nancial, human, and time resources. Simulation is a cheaper and quicker approach for evaluating the impact of various design and development decisions. Within the Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research community, however, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how to design, de-velop, and use simulations in longer-term learning contexts. The central challenge is that adaptive learning system designers and educational practitioners have limited guidance on what steps to consider when designing simulations for supporting longer-term mentoring system design and development deci-sions. My research work takes as a starting point VanLehn et al.’s [1] introduction to applications of simulated students and Erickson et al.’s [2] suggested approach to creating simulated learning envi-ronments. My dissertation presents four research directions using a real-world longer-term mentoring context, a doctoral program, for illustrative purposes. The first direction outlines a framework for guid-ing system designers as to what factors to consider when building pedagogical simulations, fundamen-tally to answer the question: how can a system designer capture a representation of a target learning context in a pedagogical simulation model? To illustrate the feasibility of this framework, this disserta-tion describes how to build, the SimDoc model, a pedagogical model of a longer-term mentoring learn-ing environment – a doctoral program. The second direction builds on the first, and considers the issue of model fidelity, essentially to answer the question: how can a system designer determine a simulation model’s fidelity to the desired granularity level? This dissertation shows how data from a target learning environment, the research literature, and common sense are combined to achieve SimDoc’s medium fidelity model. The third research direction explores calibration and validation issues to answer the question: how many simulation runs does it take for a practitioner to have confidence in the simulation model’s output? This dissertation describes the steps taken to calibrate and validate the SimDoc model, so its output statistically matches data from the target doctoral program, the one at the university of Saskatchewan. The fourth direction is to demonstrate the applicability of the resulting pedagogical model. This dissertation presents two experiments using SimDoc to illustrate how to explore pedagogi-cal questions concerning personalization strategies and to determine the effectiveness of different men-toring strategies in a target learning context. Overall, this dissertation shows that simulation is an important tool in the AIED system design-ers’ toolkit as AIED moves towards designing, building, and evaluating AIED systems meant to support learners in longer-term learning and mentoring contexts. Simulation allows a system designer to exper-iment with various design and implementation decisions in a cost-effective and timely manner before committing to these decisions in the real world

Educational concept mapping method based on high-frequency words and Wikipedia linkage

We propose a computational method to support the learner's knowledge adoption based on conceptmapping relying on three perspectives of learning scenario represented by learning concept networks:learner’s knowledge, learning context and learning objective. Each learning concept network isgenerated based on a set of high-frequency words from a representative text sample that are connectedbased on the shortest hyperlink chains between corresponding Wikipedia articles. The learner exploresranking-based routings connecting learning concept networks by expanding a concept map in twocomplementing learning modes: assisted construction and assistive evaluation, with focused andcontextualized emphasis. Based on the method we have implemented a prototype of an educational tooland its preliminary testing indicated that the method can well support personalized knowledge adoption.Peer reviewe

MeIPeAS: An Intelligent Virtual Tutor for Mexican Elementary Schoolchildren

Artículo en revista indizada publicado en Research in Computing ScienceIt is known that virtual tutors have a wide range of functionalities, which have been little exploited and applied in the educational field at the primary level. However, these functionalities allow to offer mechanisms of interaction with students through an interactive dialogue by using text to speech, and even more sophisticated, the recognition and understanding of natural language or speech. In this paper, a personalized virtual tutor for the primary education scenario in Mexico is presented. This virtual tutor is called Mexican Intelligent Pedagogical Agent for Schoolchildren (MeIPeAS) and was created to be used as a pedagogical support mechanism offering a unique attraction for current and future generations of schoolchildren in Mexico. The virtual tutor has been validated in practice in public primary schools of the municipalities of the State of Mexico in Mexico. This validation is to analyze the impact of the user experience from the obtained results having relevant information about the reinforcement of topics taught within the classroom