Facilitating Web-based Education using Intelligent Agent Technologies., Proceeding of the 2nd International Workshop on Web-based Support Systems

Software agents will soon proliferate human organizations, education and society, helping users with information gathering, activity scheduling, email management, and individual and collaborative learning. This paper presents an intelligent Web-based educational system using multi-agent system technology and Web services technology. In this multi-agent architecture, each user is assigned with a personal assistant – software agent. In order to achieve teaching / learning tasks, humans and agents need an effective way to interact. Two alternative approaches were developed for programmable agents in which a human user can define a set of rules to direct an agent’s activities at execution time. This research also investigates concerns over user privacy and system security caused by agent programmability in an web-based interactive learning environment. 1