MAPIT: a pedagogical-relational ITS

Pier Giuseppe Rossi, Simone Carletti
2011 Procedia Computer Science  
The majority of Intelligent Tutoring System architectures are focused on supporting learners through content retrieval or in one or more given subject matters; examples of this can be found in Baghera [1], MyClass, Andes [2], Gramy, Advanced Geometry Tutor [7] . The implementation of such architectures are time-consuming and are generally not interoperable with other domains [3] . The presented research describes the experimentation of a Open Source, LMS enhanced with elements of AI aiming at
more » ... pporting online teachers' and tutors' work by using a KB specific to relational and pedagogical aspects, not connected to a specific subject matter. Such implementation needs to be provided of an authoring tool easily and readily usable by tutors and teachers of different subjects and with medium level IT training. Starting point of our investigation has been a preliminary analysis of machine-mediated, human-human interactions (MM-HHI) and communications by using the Teachers' thinking approach [4] [5] [6]. We considered messages exchanged between teachers/tutors and online students in three post-graduate, online courses running at the University of Macerata during 2008 -2010 by the Faculty of Education. The study showed that about 30% of messages concerned structured information that could be straightforwardly retrieved by an artificial agent; almost all remaining messages were instead deeply bound to student's learning path or required a significant input by the teacher/tutor, while the residual part of messages could -to some extents -be delegated to an intelligent agent having access to students' tracking data in order to display visual information to users or trigger alarms to tutors. The investigation carried out prompted us for the deployment of an Open Source chat-bot system that would retrieve information already coded into the courses or originated by students through the analysis of their activity logs; the chat-bot agent uses this structured information in order to answer students' most common questions hence relieving teachers and tutors from doing this repetitive task. The system is being implemented on a OLAT ver. 6.3 LMS loosely coupled to a JADE-based Multi Agent System in charge of processing user tracking data and running the ALICE chat-bot integrated with the platform messaging system.
doi:10.1016/j.procs.2010.12.135 fatcat:6dfouewonnfevi7zir4xu25oeu