Artificial Intelligence And Big Data Technologies To Close The Achievement Gap.

We observe achievement gaps even in rich western countries, such as the UK, which in principle have the resources as well as the social and technical infrastructure to provide a better deal for all learners. The reasons for such gaps are complex and include the social and material poverty of some learners with their resulting other deficits, as well as failure by government to allocate sufficient resources to remedy the situation. On the supply side of the equation, a single teacher or university lecturer, even helped by a classroom assistant or tutorial assistant, cannot give each learner the kind of one-to-one attention that would really help to boost both their motivation and their attainment in ways that might mitigate the achievement gap. In this chapter Benedict du Boulay, Alexandra Poulovassilis, Wayne Holmes, and Manolis Mavrikis argue that we now have the technologies to assist both educators and learners, most commonly in science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects (STEM), at least some of the time. We present case studies from the fields of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) and Big Data. We look at how they can be used to provide personalised support for students and demonstrate that they are not designed to replace the teacher. In addition, we also describe tools for teachers to increase their awareness and, ultimately, free up time for them to provide nuanced, individualised support even in large cohorts

The future of technology enhanced active learning – a roadmap

The notion of active learning refers to the active involvement of learner in the learning process, capturing ideas of learning-by-doing and the fact that active participation and knowledge construction leads to deeper and more sustained learning. Interactivity, in particular learnercontent interaction, is a central aspect of technology-enhanced active learning. In this roadmap, the pedagogical background is discussed, the essential dimensions of technology-enhanced active learning systems are outlined and the factors that are expected to influence these systems currently and in the future are identified. A central aim is to address this promising field from a best practices perspective, clarifying central issues and formulating an agenda for future developments in the form of a roadmap

A conceptual architecture for interactive educational multimedia

Learning is more than knowledge acquisition; it often involves the active participation of the learner in a variety of knowledge- and skills-based learning and training activities. Interactive multimedia technology can support the variety of interaction channels and languages required to facilitate interactive learning and teaching. A conceptual architecture for interactive educational multimedia can support the development of such multimedia systems. Such an architecture needs to embed multimedia technology into a coherent educational context. A framework based on an integrated interaction model is needed to capture learning and training activities in an online setting from an educational perspective, to describe them in the human-computer context, and to integrate them with mechanisms and principles of multimedia interaction

A generic architecture for interactive intelligent tutoring systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 07/06/2001.This research is focused on developing a generic intelligent architecture for an interactive tutoring system. A review of the literature in the areas of instructional theories, cognitive and social views of learning, intelligent tutoring systems development methodologies, and knowledge representation methods was conducted. As a result, a generic ITS development architecture (GeNisa) has been proposed, which combines the features of knowledge base systems (KBS) with object-oriented methodology. The GeNisa architecture consists of the following components: a tutorial events communication module, which encapsulates the interactive processes and other independent computations between different components; a software design toolkit; and an autonomous knowledge acquisition from a probabilistic knowledge base. A graphical application development environment includes tools to support application development, and learning environments and which use a case scenario as a basis for instruction. The generic architecture is designed to support client-side execution in a Web browser environment, and further testing will show that it can disseminate applications over the World Wide Web. Such an architecture can be adapted to different teaching styles and domains, and reusing instructional materials automatically can reduce the effort of the courseware developer (hence cost and time) in authoring new materials. GeNisa was implemented using Java scripts, and subsequently evaluated at various commercial and academic organisations. Parameters chosen for the evaluation include quality of courseware, relevancy of case scenarios, portability to other platforms, ease of use, content, user-friendliness, screen display, clarity, topic interest, and overall satisfaction with GeNisa. In general, the evaluation focused on the novel characteristics and performances of the GeNisa architecture in comparison with other ITS and the results obtained are discussed and analysed. On the basis of the experience gained during the literature research and GeNisa development and evaluation. a generic methodology for ITS development is proposed as well as the requirements for the further development of ITS tools. Finally, conclusions are drawn and areas for further research are identified

Systematic Review of Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Hard Skills Training in Virtual Reality Environments

Advances in immersive virtual reality (I-VR) technology have allowed for the development of I-VR learning environments (I-VRLEs) with increasing fidelity. When coupled with a sufficiently advanced computer tutor agent, such environments can facilitate asynchronous and self-regulated approaches to learning procedural skills in industrial settings. In this study, we performed a systematic review of published solutions involving the use of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) to support hard skills training in an I-VRLE. For the seven solutions that qualified for the final analysis, we identified the learning context, the implemented system, as well as the perceptual, cognitive, and guidance features of the utilized tutoring agent. Generally, the I-VRLEs emulated realistic work environments or equipment. The solutions featured either embodied or embedded tutor agents. The agents’ perception was primarily based on either learner actions or learner progress. The agents’ guidance actions varied among the solutions, ranging from simple procedural hints to event interjections. Several agents were capable of answering certain specific questions. The cognition of the majority of agents represented variations on branched programming. A central limitation of all the solutions was that none of the reports detailed empirical studies conducted to compare the effectiveness of the developed training and tutoring solutions.Peer reviewe