Student mobility in the area of Higher Education (HE) is gaining more attention nowadays. It is one of the cornerstones of the Bologna Process being promoted at both national and international levels. However, currently there is no technical system that would support student mobility processes and assist users in authoring educational curricula involving student mobility. In this study, the problem of student mobility programmes generation based on existing modules and programmes is considered. A similar problem is being solved in an Intelligent Tutoring Systems field using Curriculum generation techniques, but the student mobility area has a set of characteristics limiting their application to the considered problem. One of main limiting factors is that mobility programmes should be developed in an environment with heterogeneous regulations. In this environment, various established routines and regulations are used to control different aspects of the educational process. These regulations can be different in different domains and are supported by different authors independently. In this thesis, a novel framework was developed for generation of student mobility programmes in an environment with heterogeneous regulations. Two core technologies that were coherently combined in the framework are hierarchical planning and policy-based management. The policy-based planner was designed as a central engine for the framework. It extends the functionality of existing planning technologies and provides the means to carry out planning in environments with heterogeneous regulations, specified as policies. The policy-based planner enforces the policies during the planning and guarantees that the resultant plan is conformant with all policies applicable to it. The policies can be supported by different authors independently. Using them, policy authors can specify additional constraints on the execution of planning actions and extend the pre-specified task networks. Policies are enforced during the planning in a coordinated manner: situations when a policy can be enforced are defined by its scope, and the outcomes of policy evaluation are processed according to the specially defined procedures. For solving the problem of student mobility programme generation using the policy-based planner, the planning environment describing the student mobility problem area was designed and this problem was formalised as a planning task. Educational processes valid throughout the HE environment were formalised using Hierarchical Task Network planning constructs. Different mobility schemas were encoded as decomposition methods that can be combined to construct complex mobility scenarios satisfying the user requirements. New mobility programmes are developed as detailed educational processes carried out when students study according to these programmes. This provides the means to model their execution in the planning environment and guarantee that all relevant requirements are checked. The postponed policy enforcement mechanism was developed as an extension of the policy-based planner in order to improve the planning performance. In this mechanism, future dead-ends can be detected earlier during the planning using partial policy requests. The partial policy requests and an algorithm for their evaluation were introduced to examine policies for planning actions that should be executed in the future course of planning. The postponed policy enforcement mechanism was applied to the mobility programme generation problem within the descending policy evaluation technique. This technique was designed to optimise the process of programme components selection. Using it, policies for different domains can be evaluated independently in a descending order, gradually limiting the scope for the required component selection. The prototype of student mobility programme generation solution was developed. Two case studies were used to examine the process of student mobility programmes development and to analyse the role of policies in this process. Additionally, four series of experiments were carried out to analyse performance gains of the descending policy evaluation technique in planning environments with different characteristics.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T14:31:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Alessandra Zago Dahmer.pdf: 1783657 bytes, checksum: 0119f393ff40fc2cd04deafbb32c7804 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-12-18 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This thesis presents the outcomes of a research that analysed tutoring systems at distance education programs at corporate universities. Ten companies that currently offer educational courses exclusively in the distance learning format and count with tutoring support participated in the research. Research method included a survey and interviews. The research aimed to identify relevant tutor skills, their different ways of working and how tutors use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and media and resources of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) in distance courses at corporate universities. The study also aimed to analyse the consequences of the absence of a professional tutor in trainings that are offered at corporate universities, including the effectiveness of learning among students, the degree of student abandonment in these courses, and the effectiveness of the use of the virtual environment, among others. The research also revealed that some competences and responsibilities of the tutor at distance courses at corporate universities are similar to those found among tutors at academic institutions. According to the gathered data, the absence of this professional has implications for the evasion of students. The research also revealed that generally tutors use synchronous and asynchronous media and resources of the LVE to establish communication interfaces at distance learning courses at the surveyed institutions. Research also shown that there is not only one model of tutoring but several different models, usually antagonist. The research concludes that it is necessary to understand the tutoring system in the educational context in which it is integrated with the curriculum and the wky on the previous woks of the planning of tutors moviments, technologies ans activitiee. The wok is based on the mainly on the previous works of the following authors: Michael Moore, Jennifer O'Rourke, Paulo Freire, Marisa Eboli and Fernando José de Almeida / Esta tese de doutorado teve como objeto de estudo os sistemas de tutoria em programas educacionais a distância no contexto das universidades corporartivas (UC). Os resultados foram obtidos em pesquisa realizada com dez UC brasileiras que oferecem cursos educacionais exclusivamente a distância com apoio da tutoria. Os dados foram coletados mediante entrevistas e aplicação de um survey. A pesquisa teve por objetivos identificar as competências do tutor, as suas diferentes formas de atuação e como ele utiliza as tecnologias da informação e comunicação (TIC), mídias e recursos dos ambientes virtuais de aprendizagem (AVA) nos cursos a distância das UC. Este estudo também objetivou verificar quais são as consequências da ausência do profissional tutor no trabalho formativo proposto pelas UC, incluindo o grau de aprendizagem dos alunos, a probabilidade de evasão, o aproveitamento do potencial de uso dos ambientes virtuais, entre outros. Permitiu ainda constatar que algumas competências e responsabilidades do tutor de cursos a distância das UC pesquisadas são semelhantes às de um tutor de instituições acadêmicas e que, conforme dados levantados, a falta desse profissional tem implicações na evasão de alunos. De modo geral, nos cursos a distância nas instituições pesquisadas, o tutor utiliza as TIC, mídias e os recursos dos AVA nas duas interfaces de comunicação, síncrona e assíncrona. A pesquisa mostrou também que não há um modelo só de tutoria, mas diversos, muitas vezes antagônicos. A conclusão é de que é necessário compreender o sistema de tutoria no contexto educacional em que está inserido e sobretudo a sua integração com o currículo e com movimentos dos planejamentos, das tecnologias e das atividades do tutor. Este trabalho contou com parte da produção da área de educação, apoiando-se sobretudo nos seguintes autores: Michael Moore, Jennifer O Rourke, Paulo Freire, Marisa Eboli e Fernando José de Almeida