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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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Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.