As more courses are provided online, consideration must be given to providing for group working, as an integral part of the learning experience. Present online provision, based on CAL, is aimed at individual study in the main, and CSCW products are aimed at business users. We propose student support agents to help with the maintenance aims of group working, providing support in developing group relations. Our initial prototype is built in Prolog, and is based on a whiteboard architecture. In this paper we describe the design work, based on analysis of traditional face to face group project work, through to developing the prototype for testing.
INTRODUCTION There is a drive towards making higher education accessible to a greater number of participants than ever before. It is agreed in some circles that modern technology should be able to provide applications to enable students to work at their own pace or in their own time, notably Computer Aided Learning (CAL) packages. However, CAL packages are essentially aimed at independent learners, and online students should be given the opportunity to develop group working skills as well. Various forms of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) are being used for online courses, to allow for discussion between students and tutors, but their use in supporting some aspects of group work is limited. We propose a software agent that can support the maintenance aims of group project working, called a Guardian Agent.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work
for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that
copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial
advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the
first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to
redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
2. THE ROLE OF GROUP PROJECTS IN
LEARNING
Traditional undergraduate and postgraduate courses incorporate
a mixture of individual and group learning methods, and it is
acknowledged that group learning offers several advantages to
learners [
The learning cycle by Kolb [
Experiential learning and problem-based learning have been used
to encourage applying facts and skills learned to a real life
situation, often using case studies. These give the opportunity for
students to practice and reflect on the effect in a given situation,
from which they are able to formulate patterns to determine
which situations lend themselves to particular approaches. Some
university courses have been run entirely using problem-based
learning [
Learning by experimentation and making mistakes and by doing, which require immediate feedback and guidance by a tutor, are not easily accomplished within online courses. But advances in technology ought to enable us to design more adaptive CAL material, which exhibit some intelligence, called intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), and to allow for more rapid communication of feedback, so that future online courses are an improvement on correspondence courses.
Online courses can be solitary affairs, unless Summer schools, Saturday workshops etc. are included in the programme. However, these reduce the self-paced element of online courses, as students must prepare for a group tutorial on a particular date. Management of such courses to incorporate a group project will require considerable negotiation of availability and readiness, in order to gather together an appropriate number of students capable of working together for a given period of time. A number of problems arise when adapting a conventional approach to group projects for students working online: • • • • • students are working at their own pace and in their own time, so a timetable must be imposed either by the group itself or by the course leader; organising conventional meetings is not possible, but a substitute is necessary, probably aided by technology; sharing information must be enabled by technology, students must be able to express their opinions online, which may require different skills; assessment is probably not possible on an individual basis, but a group mark may not be acceptable if students recognise that members of a group are not pulling their weight; tutors may experience difficulties monitoring the progress of groups of students.
An important area of CSCW research is into improving the
support provided for online work. Distance learning is a growing
market and as higher education institutions strive to provide
online learning experiences, consideration should be given to
providing an interface which gives a level of support comparable
to that provided on campus based courses. Social inclusion is an
important aim of online provision, and these learners often have
the face to face groups tended to find the progress
meetings helpful and found it easiest to get started,
the online team tended not to trust each other as much
as the others, experienced less support from each other,
they also felt they learned less by working in a group
and learned less by discussing and explaining ideas to
each other.
3.2. Comparisons between online and face to
face working
Computer mediated communication (CMC) tools, such as
conferencing, email, discussion forums support the
communication needs for the task roles of group projects,
examples include studies of co-operative learning in a virtual
university [
binding.
Again face-to-face agreement is binding. Problems will become apparent at each meeting, and action agreed.
Some discussion essential, which may take time. Sub-groupings are spontaneous. Final agreement of allocation is binding.
Individuals will bring hard copies of their work to explain to each other. An individual is responsible for collating the work.
Email, video-conference, bulletin board, groupware, guardian agent. Email, video-conference, bulletin board, groupware, guardian agent.
board, groupware, written post or fax, guardian agent.
In order to see how new technology can be applied to group projects, it is necessary to analyse the stages of a group project, to determine the particular problems encountered at the different stages, and to determine whether new ways of working may be possible, rather than simply adapting a current traditional project, and where support in the form of a Guardian Agent might be appropriate.
This table identifies some of the tools that could be applied at the different stages of the group project. It can be seen that the meeting plays a prominent part in getting the group established, formulating ground rules and identifying individual talents. At face to face meetings non-contribution by members is implied by non-attendance, also disagreement and other negative feelings are often recognised by visual cues. Agreement between members at a face to face meeting might be more binding than agreement arrived at online. Hence an online project will require a considerable amount of support, if it is to be kept on track. Typical problems with face-to-face meetings include: making sure that discussion is relevant, keeping to a reasonable meeting time, ensuring all members are present and keeping to the agenda. Email and bulletin board messages tend to be shorter and succinct, though it is possible to be sidetracked into discussion that is not relevant, and a member that suggests online that this is happening would be very brave. Obviously time is a critical factor in face-to-face meetings, but not so for online discussions which are asynchronous, though long waits for responses from group members may be unwelcome. Online discussions should be controlled by an agenda with time limits set, so that all group members know what stage in the discussion is current. When problems arise it is often too late to do anything about them, but if a problem can be anticipated, the project can often get back onto schedule without wasting too much time. At faceto-face meetings individual worries may be aired that may or may not be significant. Problems, such as lack of skills, can often be resolved by explanation from other group members. When the time plan appears to be getting behind schedule it is often possible for group members to agree to a change of plan, by reallocating tasks. This means that a traditional time plan is likely to be more fluid than an online one.
Drawbacks with online technologies include: • the time taken for a discussion and to reach collective agreement; • the time it might take to recognise potential problems; • getting all members to agree their responsibilities; • knowing who can do which parts of the project; • recognising when extra help with skills is needed; • bringing the project together.
Some groupware products provide features which help with
these problems, but these are designed for business use, and may
not adequately help the students to acquire appropriate group
working skills. There is also a need for tutors to be able to
monitor the progress of the project. These difficulties represent
the sort of capabilities that could be offered by a group support
agent, however, a commitment to the group project by each
individual is still an essential ingredient.
4. ARCHITECTURE OF A GUARDIAN
AGENT
An agent is a self-contained, concurrently executing software
process, which encapsulates the current state in terms of
knowledge, and is able to communicate with other agents
through message passing [
Each student working on the project will have an individual agent, operating in the background, watching progress, measuring it against the plan and taking remedial action when necessary. The agents belonging to each member of the group are able to communicate with each other to exchange information and negotiate on behalf of the students.
The agent might recognise that lack of time is becoming a problem when monitoring the progress of the project against a plan of the work to be completed, and a variety of solutions might be suggested. Similarly, lack of skills could be recognised by the appearance of errors in the work, or the student asking how to do a particular task. The individual agent will support an individual student, but in addition this agent will communicate with the other students’ agents to support the group as a whole to ensure that the project is completed satisfactorily. The student will also be free to work unaided by the agent if so desired, though monitoring will continue unobtrusively.
It is not proposed that such an agent will replace the tutor’s
input, but the agent will perform some of the mundane
administrative tasks, which are usually performed by the group
members during face-to-face meetings automatically, but which
do not need to be performed by the students in order to fulfil the
learning outcomes of the group project. The role of the tutor is
different for online learning [
Student
Student
Student Guardian
Agent
Guardian
Agent
Guardian
Agent
4.1. Development of the Guardian Agent
Students undertaking group projects in a traditional setting face
several problems to a greater or lesser degree. The results of
surveys on group projects have been considered closely when
deciding what functions software agents should undertake in
supporting group working [
The process of allocating roles begins with finding out about each other’s abilities. Students who have worked with each other previously will have a good idea about this already, but online students will have to explicitly describe themselves. The agent asks its student to identify the predetermined task areas he or she likes, is good at, dislikes and is not good at. These are filed as Prolog facts and posted to the whiteboard, where the other agents can access the information. One of the agents is given the role of allocating tasks to the students and, after checking that all the students have posted their abilities list to the whiteboard, this agent determines which students should be allocated which task, using the following rule:
Then studentA should do X.
A series of allocation facts will then be posted to the whiteboard. If no student has been allocated to a particular task the agent looks again at the facts at its disposal and using the following rule, decides whether any student may be able to perform a task if given appropriate training:
Then studentB should be offered training in X A series of training facts are similarly posed to the whiteboard. It is likely that there will be some conflict to resolve, such as too many students being allocated to the same task, or no student allocated or offered training for a task. After informing the students of the conflict, the agents may negotiate on behalf of their student to solve the conflicts if the student does not choose to negotiate unaided.
The next planning task is to set the ground rules, identified as an
important element in successful group projects [
If online courses are to be regarded as an acceptable substitute for traditional campus-based courses, an element of group working should be incorporated into the scheme. However, online group projects require very different ways of working, though the learning outcomes should remain the same, for example to prepare the students for team working, and practice what has been learned on the course. In the future when global online team working becomes the accepted practice at work, the learning outcomes may need to be extended. Group workers experience a number of problems associated with the mainrenance aims of groupwork when working online with limited CMC support. Agents are suggested as appropriate to provide additional support which will overcome some of these difficulties.
In this paper we have reported on the initial design of agents to support students undertaking group projects, showing the chosen architecture for our prototype system. The implementation in Prolog uses an agent tool, which can be extended for a number of additional purposes.