Realizing Intelligent Pedagogical Agents in Immersive Virtual Learning Environments

While Learners enjoy the sense of presence and rich visualization in 3D Immersive Virtual Learning Environments, they require more interactivity and pedagogical guidance. Intelligent Pedagogical Agents, IPAs, which are autonomous and intelligent software entities can provide such demands if they are employed in the VLE. Theyprovide interactivity (dialogues), increase motivation and engagement, support collaborative functions, provide tutorial support, and more. This paper discusses those aspects with educational grounds. Since our target is to practically employing IPAs in the Immersive VLE, the paper reviews the required elements of such integration, visits supporting models, architectures and standards. It discusses state of the art of IPA and Immersive VLE with future perspectives of such integration

Evaluation Study and Results of Intelligent Pedagogical Agent-led Learning Scenarios in a Virtual World

The use of intelligent pedagogical agents (IPAs) has shown to provide positive learning results and new learning possibilities. The IPA has specific importance in immersive learning environments to enable 24/7 availability, offer a learning companion opportunity, and increase learner engagement. In that regard, a proof of concept prototype implementation of an intelligent pedagogical agent (IPA) in the Open Wonderland virtual world environment was created. This paper reports a qualitative evaluation study and experiment performed by a team of six experts in relevant areas of expertise. Those areas include cognitive science, computer science, e-education, and virtual worlds. The experiment studied key prototype components in relation to four learning scenarios with distributed control between the learner avatar and the pedagogical agent to answer questions relevant to their effect on learning attributes such as motivation, engagement, and the learning experience. Given the qualitative nature of the experiment, the paper also analyzes and reports results relevant to expert input of how the prototype can better contribute to future pedagogical agent realizations and the impact on learning enhancement

Seamless Integration of RESTful Services into the Web of Data

We live in an era of ever-increasing abundance of data. To cope with the information overload we suffer from every single day, more sophisticated methods are required to access, manipulate, and analyze these humongous amounts of data. By embracing the heterogeneity, which is unavoidable at such a scale, and accepting the fact that the data quality and meaning are fuzzy, more adaptable, flexible, and extensible systems can be built. RESTful services combined with Semantic Web technologies could prove to be a viable path to achieve that. Their combination a1lows data integration on an unprecedented sca1e and solves some of the problems Web developers are continuously struggling with. This paper introduces a novel approach to create machine-readable descriptions for RESTful services as a first step towards this ambitious goal. It also shows how these descriptions along with analgorithm to translate SPARQL queries to HTTP requests can be used to integrate RESTful services into a global read-write Web of Data

Enhancements of the realXtend framework to build a virtual conference room for knowledge transfer and learning purposes

Within the last years virtual 3D worlds have raised increasing interest by researchers, developers and communities in various application domains. Knowledge management and ICT-based learning settings in this context are in particular important in our globalized and knowledg-ecentered society. In this paper, we want to explore the development of a conference room in a virtual 3D world of knowledge transfer and learning purposes. To this end, we introduce the most important requirements, compare on those existing 3D systems, and outline arguments for the selected realXtend framework. This is followed by the prototype description which enables presenters to directly display the contents of their computer's screen on a presentation wall inside the virtual conference room, while interacting with the other users by means of an avatar in the virtual space. First findings and proposals for further work conclude this paper

Implementing intelligent pedagogical agents in virtual worlds: Tutoring natural science experiments in OpenWonderland

Intelligent Pedagogical Agents (IPAs) can be thought of as embodied intelligent agents that are designed for pedagogical purposes to support learning. They can be designed in particular for virtual worlds. Virtual worlds are becoming an interesting medium for engineering education for the properties of visual collaboration abilities providing authentic learning experiences and for the opportunity of providing active learning. However, virtual worlds need more educational support to be more inhabited with increased learning services. Incorporating intelligent pedagogical agents into virtual worlds adds such learning support by adding intelligence, improving believability, and the opportunity to increase communication with an artificial educator. However the implementation of intelligent pedagogical agents and adopting them in a virtual world require several efforts with different aspects of implementation. This paper reports our first prototype implementation of an IPA interacting with a learner and a learning object in natural science experiment in a virtual world while providing supporting multi-modal communication abilities. The IPA has features of text chat based on the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML), a text-to-speech synthesis function, and non-verbal communication abilities through gesture animation. The implementation is presented through explained scenarios of the IPA tutoring an experiment or monitoring a learner avatar interaction with a learning object in a Virtual World. The IPA & the learning scenarios are implemented in the open source of Open Wonderland

Simulating Interactive Learning Scenarios with Intelligent Pedagogical Agents in a Virtual World through BDI-Based Agents

Intelligent Pedagogical Agents (IPAs) are designed for pedagogical purposes to support learning in 3D virtual learning environments. Several benefits of IPAs have been found adding to support learning effectiveness. Pedagogical agents can be thought of as a central point of interaction between the learner and the learning environment. And hence, the intelligent behavior and functional richness of pedagogical agents have the potential to reward back into increased engagement and learning effectiveness. However, the realization of those agents remains to be a challenge based on intelligent agents in virtual worlds. This paper reports the challenging reasons and most importantly an approach for simplification. A simulation based on BDI agents is introduced opening the road for several extensions and experimentation before implementation of IPAs in a virtual world can take place. The simulation provides a proof-of concept based on three intelligent agents to represent an IPA, a learner, and learning object implemented in JACK and Jadex intelligent agent platforms. To that end, the paper exhibits the difficulties, resolutions, and decisions made when designing and implementing the learning scenario in both domains of the virtual world and the agent-based simulation while comparing the two agent platforms

Intelligent Pedagogical Agents in Immersive Virtual Learning Environments: A Review

The concept of Intelligent Pedagogical Agents (IPA) has been an important research topic for a long time. IPA is supported by multi-agent systems research derived from AI. IPA provides personalized instruction, increase learner motivation, and act pedagogically on behalf or with the learner. On the other hand, virtual environments add value to the education process by giving new educational possibilities and computational-richness support. Combining both IPA and Virtual environments can make a promising approach for effective computer-aided learning. This paper provides a review on IPA and related topics focusing on a general overview of the topic, gives a detailed review in the application domain of virtual learning environments, and outlines a proposal for a flexible conceptual approach for the flexible application in different learning settings

Service-oriented flexible and interoperable assessment: towards a standardised e-assessment system

Free-text answers assessment has been a field of interest during the last 50 years. Several free-text answers assessment tools underpinned by different techniques have been developed. In most cases, the complexity of the underpinned techniques has caused those tools to be designed and developed as stand-alone tools. The rationales behind using computers to assist learning assessment are mainly to save time and cost, as well as to reduce staff workload. However, utilising free-text answers assessment tools separately form the learning environment may increase the staff workload and increase the complexity of the assessment process. Therefore, free-text answers scorers have to have a flexible design to be integrated within the context of the e-assessment system architectures taking advantages of software-as-a-service architecture. Moreover, flexible and interoperable e-assessment architecture has to be utilised in order to facilitate this integration. This paper discusses the importance of flexible and interoperable e-assessment. Moreover, it proposes a service-oriented flexible and interoperable architecture for futuristic e-assessment systems. Nevertheless, it shows how such architecture can foster the e-assessment process in general and the free-text answers assessment in particular

Adding Semantic Web Knowledge to Intelligent Personal Assistant Agents

Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA) agents are software agents which assist users in performing specific tasks. They should be able to communicate, cooperate, discuss, and guide people. This paper presentsa proposal to add Semantic Web Knowledge to IPA agents. In our solution,the IPA agent has a modular knowledge organization composed by four differentiated areas: (i) the rational area, which adds semantic webknowledge, (ii) the association area, which simplifies building appropriate responses, (iii) the commonsense area, which provides common sense responses, and (iv) the behavioral area, which allows IPA agents to show empathy. Our main objective is to create more intelligent and more humana alike IPA agents, enhancing the current abilities that these software agents provide