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Tech Report kmi-98-10 Abstract


Improving the quality of the student’s learning experience: an agent-based approach to on-line study guides
Techreport ID: kmi-98-10
Date: 1998
Author(s): Chris McKillop
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Study guides are a valuable resource for the distance education student. With the growing trend of putting courses on-line there an increase in the number of on-line study guides. This paper looks at how distance education students interact with their learning materials and considers ways of making this more engaging and effective by looking at the importance of affective responses. The use of an agent-based approach to on-line study guides is proposed as a way of achieving this. This approach can provide a more personal and conversational style through the use of voice and face which has been shown to be effective at engaging a student and producing a positive effect on the student’s perception of their learning experience as well as increasing performance outcomes. This paper argues that these findings should be applied to on-line study guides to improve the quality of the student’s learning experience.
 
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Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.