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Virtual experts : who's online?

conference contribution
posted on 2005-01-01, 00:00 authored by Paul Nicholson, Julia Walsh
There will be between 30 and 80 million online students in the world by 2025. Globally, school systems are investing huge resources in the development of online education programs in order to meet this demand. Related implications for online teaching have been largely ignored despite evidence of the greatly increased workload for online teachers and widespread student dissatisfaction with online leaming experiences. Opportunities for improving the online experience for both leamers and teachers revolve around minimizing procedural inefficiencies in dealing with large numbers of individual students, as opposed to a single class, and of enhancing students' social and cognitive engagement with leaming. Intelligent software agents that can automate many routine online tasks and some aspects of leamer interaction have enormous potential to facilitate this. These agents that can act as a personal online coach, mentor or tutor to increase the individualisation of learning. The development of evidence-based agent personas is essential if agents are to fulfil specific educational roles. CUITently there is little progress being made in this area because of the lack of an agentrole model that can be used to implement specific educational personas in agents. In this paper we discuss key foundational elements of the nature and basis for implementing elements of educational expertise in software and how this could be used in developing agent persona models for specific educational roles and a model for implementing pedagogical constructs in intelligent educational software.

History

Event

IFIP world conference on computers in education (8th : 2005 : Cape Town, South Africa)

Pagination

1 - 6

Publisher

Emerald

Location

Cape Town, South Africa

Place of publication

Bradford, England

Start date

2005-07-04

End date

2005-07-07

ISSN

0741-9058

Language

eng

Publication classification

E1 Full written paper - refereed

Editor/Contributor(s)

J Pittman

Title of proceedings

WCCE 2005 : 8th IFIP World Conference on Computers in Education: 40 Years of Computers in Education: What Works?

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