Transformation in education over the decades has failed to keep abreast of the rapidly advancing technological environment of modern society. This implies that curricula, learning paradigms and tools employed by educational institutions are not in sync with the technologically oriented lifestyle of modern society. Learners are therefore unable to apply and assimilate their daily life experiences into the learning process. This disparity warrants radical transformation in education, so as to furnish the appropriate education system where learners are able to construct their knowledge on the basis of pre-existing ideas and experiences. However, any transformation in the e~ucation approach should essentially be complemented by the adoption of appropriate learning environments and paradigms that can capitalize on learners' life experiences as well as elicit the appropriate learning behaviour and attitudes for effective and life-long learning. Much of the literature reviewed affirms the efficacy of virtual learning environments as mediums that can facilitate effective learner-centred electronic-learning suitable for modern society. They are asserted as liberators of learning in respect of instructivist ideals, information access and the confines of the physical classroom. This is confirmed by findings of this research, which are generally in favour of the virtual learning environment's ability to enhance the learning experiences of learners but remained inconclusive on their learning outcomes. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.

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Les jeux sérieux (serious-games en anglais) sont de plus en plus utilisés dans le domaine de la formation, le but étant alors d'apprendre une ou plusieurs compétences liée(s) à un métier ou à des qualités plus générales, à un ou plusieurs apprenants (joueurs), ceci avec une dimension ludique. Mesurer qualitativement ou quantitativement le succès ou non de cet apprentissage, ce qui relève au final d'un processus d'évaluation du ou des l'apprenant(s), constitue ces dernières années un enjeu majeur dans les jeux sérieux s'ajoutant aux problématiques plus classiques de conception et de scénarisation.Dans un contexte de jeux sérieux multi-acteurs, avec apprentissage de tâches collaboratives réalisées par différents acteurs humains ou virtuels partageant un but commun, cette recherche s'intéresse au processus d'évaluation des apprenants, conduisant à une évaluation tant individuelle que collective. Nous proposons tout d'abord un cadre méthodologique pour l'évaluation des apprenants pour de tels jeux. Ce cadre méthodologique est basé sur le concept « d'espace d'évaluation » associé à un point de vue correspondant à un objectif d'évaluation particulier, Nous proposons ensuite une architecture logicielle spécifique à base d'agents, d'une part permettant à des apprenants humains et des joueurs virtuels d'interagir (simulation de comportements), et d'autre part supportant une évaluation tant individuelle que collective des apprenants. Cette architecture logicielle est implémentée et intégrée au jeu sérieux SIMFOR, et sa mise en oeuvre est illustrée sur un scénario réaliste relatif à la formation à la gestion de crise. / Serious Games (SG) are increasingly used in the field of training, SG aims to teach one or more skills(s) related to a business or to more general qualities, to one or more learners (players), this with a playful dimension. Usually, SG aims a specific training objective related to a specific context training which can be linked to a trade (eg fire ), a body of knowledge (school or university), or the acquisition of social skills (conflict management, cooperation ...). To Measure the success or failure of this learning is ultimately an assessment process of the learner(s) and in recent years became a major issue in SG in addition to issues classic design and screenwriting.In the context of multi-player SG, with a collaborative tasks learning performed by different learners (or virtual actor) sharing a common goal, our research focuses on the assessment of learning processes, leading to both individual and collective assessment. We propose first a methodological framework for learners assessment. This methodological framework is based on the "Evaluation space" concept associated with a specific view corresponding to a particular assessment objective, leading to the calculation of indicators, based on specific knowledge models representation and assessment. In order to operationalize this methodological assessment framework, we propose a agents based architecture, on the one hand allowing human learners and virtual players (simulation of behavior) interaction, and other hand supporting individual and collective learners' assessment. This architecture is implemented and integrated to the SIMFOR SG, and illustrated in a crisis management scenario exercise.

Orientador: Marizilda dos Santos Menezes / Banca: Antônio Nelson Rodrigues da Silva / Banca: Dijon de Moraes / Banca: Olimpio José Pinheiro / Banca: Vânia Cristina Pires Nogueira Valente / Resumo: O objetivo deste trabalho é propor recomendações para o desenvolvimento de ferramentas de suporte à Educação a Distância. Essas ferramentas foram delimitadas como os ambientes virtuais de aprendizagem e sistemas tutores inteligentes, vistos a partir da ótica do design gráfico, dentro das especificações do design instrucional. A Educação a Distância é um fazer pedagógico que procura atender a sociedade da informação e do conhecimento. Para isso, ela faz uso da educação online, que se processa pela Internet, envolvendo a interação de pessoas. A terceira geração da educação a distância, baseada nas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação; usa os ambientes virtuais, os sistemas tutores inteligentes e as tecnologias interativas. O design instrucional é identificado como uma metodologia educacional que, por meio da tecnologia, propõe práticas e soluções para uma aprendizagem colaborativa e autônoma. Essa responsabilidade e abrangência cruzam os caminhos com o design. O designer gráfico e o webdesigner fazem parte da equipe multidisciplinar que compõe o design instrucional. Mesmo havendo vários sistemas eletrônicos de aprendizagem no mercado, várias instituições de ensino optam por desenvolvê-los internamente, privilegiando mais a generalidade do que a usabilidade. Para entender o desenvolvimento de sistemas tutores e ambientes virtuais, alguns processos, que regem a inteligência, a emoção, a percepção, a inteligência virtual, a ergonomia e a usabilidade, devem ser vistos como premissas básicas de tendências de aplicação. Assim, as recomendações deste trabalho, baseadas em uma metodologia de detalhamento do design instrucional, abordaram alguns passos, que foram o planejamento de unidades de aprendizagem, em que se verifica a aplicação do design gráfico; o desenvolvimento de roteiros e storyboards, e a definição... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: The objective of this word is to propose recommendations for the development of tools supporting the Distance Education. These tools had been delimited as virtual environments of learning and intelligent tutorial systems, in the approach to graphic design, inside of the specifications of instructional design. A Distance Education is one to make pedagogical for the society of the information and the knowledge. For this, it makes use of the education online, that it processes itself for the Internet, involving the interaction of people. The third generation of the distance education, based in the Information Technologies and Communication, uses virtual environments, the intelligent tutorial systems and the interactive technologies. Instructional Design is identified as an educational methodology that, by means of the tecnology, consider practical and solutions for a collaborative and independent learning. This responsability and wide-ranging cross the ways with design. Graphical designer and webdesigner are part of multidiscipline team that composes instructional design. Even with several some electronic systems of learning in the market, some institutions of education opt to develop them internally, focusing more the generality of what the usability. To understand the development of tutorial systems and virtual environments, some processes, that conduct intelligence, the emotion, the perception, virtual intelligence, the ergonomics and the usability, they must be seen as basic premises of application trends. Thus, the recommendations of this work, based in a methology of detailing of instructional design, had approached some steps, that had been the planning of units of learning, where if verify the application of design graphical; the development of scripts and storyboards, and the definition of structures of navigation for menus; design of media contents, that... (Complete abstract, click electronic access below) / Mestre

Submitted by JOSIANE SANTOS DE OLIVEIRA (josianeso) on 2018-04-12T15:56:11Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Antônio Augusto Alves_.pdf: 3906232 bytes, checksum: a3df4f42f4828f898dabdee4e931412d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-04-12T15:56:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Antônio Augusto Alves_.pdf: 3906232 bytes, checksum: a3df4f42f4828f898dabdee4e931412d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-01-18 / Nenhuma / Alunos que conseguem manter a atenção em uma atividade apresentam um melhor desempenho nas atividades escolares. A habilidade de manter o foco em uma atividade é essencial para que o estudante tenha um desempenho satisfatório na escola. Nas últimas duas décadas houve um aumento no interesse pelos estudos sobre mindfulness e seus efeitos positivos na saúde, bem-estar e na melhora das habilidades cognitivas. No âmbito escolar o mindfulness tem se mostrado uma técnica relevante para a melhora da atenção de alunos praticantes. Estudos recentes mostram que a realização de sessões de mindfulness proporciona ao aluno uma melhora na atenção, desempenho escolar, no controle das emoções e no relacionamento com os professores e colegas. Embora exista também um número crescente de pesquisas que fazem uso de recursos computacionais para incentivar a prática de mindfulness em contextos não escolares, são poucos os trabalhos que integram o uso de mindfulness em sistemas tutores inteligentes ou em outros tipos de ambientes de aprendizagem. Além disso, nenhum dos trabalhos propõe um treinamento personalizado às características do aprendiz. O presente trabalho propõe um agente que fornece exercícios de mindfulness guiado e adaptado ao estado de humor do aluno e à sua experiência em meditação. Através dos dados coletados pelo sistema, é possível a seleção dos exercícios mais adequados para o aluno, bem como o ajuste do tempo de duração dos exercícios. O agente visa encorajar o estudante a praticar técnicas de meditação para a melhora da atenção e do rendimento acadêmico e da promoção do bem-estar geral do aluno. Este agente foi integrado como estudo de caso ao sistema tutor PAT2Math para a realização de avaliação com 41 alunos durante 7 semanas. Para fins de avaliação foram utilizadas 3 versões do sistema tutor inteligente PAT2Math. A primeira versão utilizou áudios com narrações de técnicas de meditação sem adaptação à experiência ou ao estado de humor apresentado pelo aluno; a segunda versão utilizou 3 gravações de áudio que narravam a história da álgebra e das equações. A terceira e última versão utilizou 24 gravações de áudio com diferentes técnicas de meditação e diferentes durações para que as técnicas utilizadas pudessem ser adaptadas à experiência e ao humor do estudante. Os resultados da avaliação mostraram que a prática de mindfulness de forma guiada e personalizada melhora a atenção do aluno. No entanto, possivelmente devido à duração do experimento, não foram encontradas evidências estatisticamente significativas de um impacto positivo na aprendizagem do aluno. / Students who are able to maintain attention in an activity present a better performance in school activities. The ability to focus on an activity is essential for the student to perform satisfactorily at school. Over the last two decades there has been an increase interest in studies on mindfulness and its positive effects on health, well-being and improvement of cognitive abilities. In the school context, mindfulness has shown to be a relevant technique for the improvement of the students’ attention. Recent studies show that performing mindfulness sessions provides the student with improved attention, school performance, control of emotions, and relationships with teachers and peers. Although there are also a growing number of researches that uses computational resources to encourage the practice of mindfulness, there are few works that integrate the use of mindfulness in intelligent tutors systems or in other types of learning environments. In addition, none of the works proposes a personalized training to the characteristics of the learner. The present work proposes an agent that provides exercises of mindfulness that are guided and adapted to the students’ mood and their experience in meditation. Through the data collected by the system, it is possible to select the most appropriate exercises for the student, as well to adjust the duration of the exercises. The agent aims to encourage the student to practice meditation techniques to improve attention and academic achievement and promote the general well-being of the student. As a case study, this agent was integrated to PAT2Math, an algebra intelligent tutoring system, for the evaluation with 41 students for 7 weeks. For evaluation purposes, 3 versions of the PAT2Math intelligent tutoring system were used. The first version used audios with narratives of meditation techniques without adaptation to the experience or mood presented by the student; the second version used 3 audio recordings that told the story of algebra and equations. The third and final version used 24 audio recordings with different meditation techniques and different durations so that the techniques used could be adapted to the student's experience and mood. The results of the evaluation showed that the practice of mindfulness in a guided and personalized way improves the attention of the student. However, possibly due to the duration of the experiment, no statistically significant evidence of a positive impact on student learning was found.

abstract: Feedback represents a vital component of the learning process and is especially important for Computer Science students. With class sizes that are often large, it can be challenging to provide individualized feedback to students. Consistent, constructive, supportive feedback through a tutoring companion can scaffold the learning process for students. This work contributes to the construction of a tutoring companion designed to provide this feedback to students. It aims to bridge the gap between the messages the compiler delivers, and the support required for a novice student to understand the problem and fix their code. Particularly, it provides support for students learning about recursion in a beginning university Java programming course. Besides also providing affective support, a tutoring companion could be more effective when it is embedded into the environment that the student is already using, instead of an additional tool for the student to learn. The proposed Tutoring Companion is embedded into the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This thesis focuses on the reasoning model for the Tutoring Companion and is developed using the techniques of a neural network. While a student uses the IDE, the Tutoring Companion collects 16 data points, including the presence of certain key words, cyclomatic complexity, and error messages from the compiler, every time it detects an event, such as a run attempt, debug attempt, or a request for help, in the IDE. This data is used as inputs to the neural network. The neural network produces a correlating single output code for the feedback to be provided to the student, which is displayed in the IDE. The effectiveness of the approach is examined among 38 Computer Science students who solve a programming assignment while the Tutoring Companion assists them. Data is collected from these interactions, including all inputs and outputs for the neural network, and students are surveyed regarding their experience. Results suggest that students feel supported while working with the Companion and promising potential for using a neural network with an embedded companion in the future. Challenges in developing an embedded companion are discussed, as well as opportunities for future work. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Software Engineering 2019

As the amount of accessible and shareable knowledge increases, it is figured out that learning platforms offering the same context and learning path to all users can not meet the demands of learners. This issue brings out the necessity of designing and developing adaptive hypermedia systems. This study describes an agent-based adaptive learning framework whose goal is to implement effective tutoring system with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and cognitive didactic methods into Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems (AEHS) in the domain of Unified Modeling Language (UML). There are three main goals of this study. First goal is to explore how supportive agents affect student&rsquo / s learning achievement in distance learning. Second goal is to examine the interaction between supportive agents and learners with the help of experiments in Human Computer Interaction laboratories and system analysis. The effects of the methodology that agents give misleading hints which are common mistakes of other learners are also investigated. Last goal is to deliver effective feedback to students both from IAs and tutors. In order to assess that UML-ALF has accomplished its objectives, we followed an experimental procedure. Experimental groups have taken the advantage of adaptive and intelligent techniques of the UML-ALF and control groups have used the traditional learning techniques. The results show that there is a positive correlation between variables practice score and number of agent suggestion which means, as the participants benefit from supportive agents, they get higher scores.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed March 8, 2010). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-147).

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Web-based collaborative learning is becoming an increasingly popular educational paradigm as more individuals who are geographically isolated seek higher education. As such students do not meet face to face with their peers and teachers, support for collaboration becomes extremely important. Successful collaboration means asking questions to gain a better understanding of the main concepts, elaborating and justifying opinions and sharing and explaining ideas. When group members' combined skills are sufficient to complete the learning task, effective group work can result in greater overall achievement than individual learning. Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) have been shown to be highly effective at increasing students' performance and motivation. They achieve their intelligence by representing pedagogical decisions about how to teach as well as information about the learner. Constraint based tutors are a class of ITSs that use Constraint-based Modelling(CBM) to represent student and domain models. Proposed by Ohlsson, CBM is based on learning from performance errors, and focuses on correct knowledge. In this thesis, we present COLLECT-UML, a collaborative constraint-based ITS that teaches object-oriented analysis and design using Unified Modelling Language (UML). While teaching how to design UML class diagrams, COLLECT-UML also provides feedback on collaboration. Being a constraint-based tutor, COLLECT-UML represents the domain knowledge as a set of syntax and semantic constraints. However, it is the first system to also represent a higher-level skill such as collaboration using the same formalism. We started by developing a single-user ITS that supported students in learning UML class diagrams. The system was evaluated in a real classroom, and the results showed that students' performance increased significantly. We then extended the system to provide support for collaboration as well as domain-level support. The enhancement process included implementation of the shared workspace, modification of the pedagogical module to support groups of users, designing and implementing a group-modelling component, and developing a set of meta-constraints which are used to represent an ideal model of collaboration. The effectiveness of the system was evaluated in two studies. In addition to improved problem-solving skills, the participants both acquired declarative knowledge about effective collaboration and did collaborate more effectively. The participants enjoyed working with the system and found it a valuable asset to their learning. The results, therefore, show that CBM is an effective technique for modelling and supporting collaboration in computer-supported collaborative learning environments.