INTELLIGENT AGENT AS A TOOL TO MONITOR ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN

WEB BASED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Mohd Fadli Bin Ahdon1
Zuraihah Binti Ngadengon2
Mime Azrina Binti Jaafar 3
Jabatan Teknologi Maklumat dan Kommunikasi
Politeknik Tuanku Syed Sirajuddin
02600, Arau, Perlis, Malaysia
e-mail: fadli187@yahoo.com1, zu_ngadungon@yahoo.com2, mime_aj119@yahoo.com3

ABSTRACT
Agent-based computing has been hailed as the next significant break-through in software
development and the new revolution in software. Nowadays, education trend in Malaysia is
gearing towards implementation of a web-based learning environment. Therefore, intelligent
agent has open new ways of learning technique such that the agents can be used specifically to
support and guide the interaction between the student and the system. However, most of the
sites provided minimal guidance for the student in problem solving exercise. Due to this
problem, the aim of this research is to build an animated intelligent agent that can be used to
monitor student progress, to probe question, to give hints and to provide explanations during
problem solving process in Java Programming coursework. Furthermore, these agents will
provide intelligent feedback to the student in the form of hints, answer and explanations, and
assist in the assessment of students understanding. For this research, factors such as gaze,
eye contact, body language, and emotional expression will be modeled and exploited for
instructional purpose. Finally, the use of intelligent agents in web-based educational system
would make the on-line learning environment as interactive and responsive to individual needs
as a human tutor by adapting to the change of the students needs, environment and learning
style.
Keywords: Intelligent Agents, Web-Based Learning, Animated Intelligent Agent, Interactive,
Learning Style and Object Oriented Programming.

1.0

INTRODUCTION

The influence and capability of the World Wide Web (WWW) has opened new and innovative
ways of learning and teaching. The WWW provides users with a uniform and convenient means
of assessing the vast resources of the Internet. For educators, the WWW provides an exciting
new opportunity for E-learning and E-teaching environment. Web-based educational system can
be accessed globally independent on time and geographic location using multi-platform
environment such as UNIX, Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. Recently, there are thousands

of web-based educational systems on the WWW. However, majority of the sites only provide
minimal guidance for the student in problem solving exercise (Sargeant, 2008). All students
have to answer the same questions on the same web pages without considering their
understanding level. The solution to this problem is to exploit the advance web-based
educational system and integrate them with intelligent agent that offers interactivity and
adaptability. The use of intelligent agents in web-based educational system would make the
online learning environment as interactive and responsive to individual needs as a human tutor.
Intelligent agent can adapts to the changing needs of the students, their environment as well as
their learning style. The agent builds up a character map of the learner in the same way that a
human tutor does.
2.0

OVERVIEW OF INTELLIGENT AGENT

An intelligent agent (or simply an agent) is a software program that uses agent communication
protocols to exchange information for automatic problem solving. It might have services
capabilities, autonomous decision, and commitments features. In the Internet, intelligent agent
is a program that gathers information or performs some other service without your immediate
presence and on some regular schedule. Typically, an agent program use the parameters you
have provided to search all or some part of the Internet, gathers information you are interested
in, and presents it to you on a daily or other periodic basis. An intelligent agent may also be
referred to as a "knowbot" or "bot" (short for robot).
The dictionary definitions of an 'agent' are: (Collins English Dictionary)
Agent (n.) 1. A person who acts on behalf of another person, group, business, government etc.
2. A person or thing that acts or has the power to act.
3. A substance or organism that extorts some force or effect.
4. The means by which something occurs or is achieved.
5. A person representing a business concerns (i.e. a traveling salesman).
Intelligent agents are software entities that carry out some set of operations on behalf of a user
or another program with some degree of independence or autonomy, and at the same time,
employ some knowledge or representation of the user's goals or desires.
Roesler and Hawkins (2010) describe intelligent agent as an independent computer programs
operating within software environments such as operating systems, databases, or computer
networks. One typical use of intelligent agents is to help users with routine computer tasks,
while still accommodating individual habits. According to Pattie Maes from Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), intelligent agents are computational systems that inhabit some
complex, dynamic environment, sense and act autonomously in this environment. and by doing
so realize a set of goals or tasks that they are designed for (Maes, 2009).
The intelligent agents technology combines artificial intelligence like reasoning, planning and
natural language processing. It also requires system development techniques like objectoriented programming, scripting languages, human-machine interface and distributed
processing.

Intelligent agent has the following general characteristics: (Knapik & Johnson, 2008)
a. Autonomy: the ability to operate without direct human intervention.
b. Social ability: the ability to communicate with humans or other agents.
c. Reactive: the ability to respond appropriately to changes within their environment or in
the needs and preferences of the user.
d. Proactive: the ability to take initiative to act in order to achieve the goals determined by
the user.
e. Mobility: the ability to travel through the network executing commands and carrying
accumulated data with them.
f. Collaborative behavior: the ability to work with other types of agents, which possess
various capabilities in order to achieve a common goal.
g. Adaptive: the ability to learn from experience and use that learning to improve behavior
and reasoning processes.
h. Inferential: the ability to use prior knowledge of general goals and methods in order to
act on abstract specifications, and also be flexible enough to extrapolate from given
information.
Although intelligent agents can embody any combination of these characteristics, they
frequently have very limited and discrete functions. The high level of intelligence and autonomy
attributed to some agents is the synthesis of aggregate activities of many types of agents
actively exchanging knowledge (Bradshaw, 2007).
One of the most promising research areas for intelligent agent is education and training. Such
an agent can be used specifically to support and guide the interaction between student and
system. This agent is refer to as pedagogical agent. Pedagogical agent is an autonomous
agent that acts as virtual tutors or teacher to create rich and face-to-face learning interactions.
The main function of this agent is to support the student according to the pedagogical theory
within learning environments. It also can serve as a pedagogical expert who can monitor and
evaluate the timing and implementation of teaching intervention such as giving help, feedback
and hint. It will act upon the environment and interact with the student in the ways that will
facilitate learning, while dynamically respond to spontaneous occurring opportunities for
instruction and personalized tutoring. This is possible because the agent monitors the progress
and current knowledge of the student in each task. The agent has knowledge of the skills that
are needed for the task, as a human tutor would demonstrate them. It then compares this
knowledge with the students performance at same skill level. When provided with a suitably rich
interface, multi-modal dialog can be added to the interaction in order to ensure instructional
effectiveness (Janca, 2010).
Pedagogical agent can also be represented in educational system as animated characters to
make the learning process more lively and appealing. Animated pedagogical agents offer great
promise for broadening the bandwidth of communication between the system and user, and
increasing the ability of the system to engage and motivate student (Johnson, 2009).
3.0

MONITORING ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

Pedagogical agent can cause learners feel that online educational material is less difficult and
also more interactive and adaptive to student. They can increase student motivation and
attention (Shaw, 2009). But most fundamentally, the agent makes it possible to more accurately

model the kinds of dialogs and interactions that occur during apprenticeship learning and oneon-one tutoring. Factors such as gaze, eye contact, body language, and emotional expression
can be modeled and exploited for instructional purposes.
In addition, by using an animated pedagogical agent for learning and teaching purpose, student
will feel more convenience compared to conventional learning style. This is because the agent
offered an interactive and adaptive method for student to gain the knowledge. Besides that,
pedagogical agent is able to make simulation and record keeping easier. It also helps the
lecturers to save their time and cost on teaching same content all over again. It is very useful for
distance education since that it is a new way of learning technique (Moshinskie, 2012).
The primary function of pedagogical agent is to support human in accordance with the
application pedagogical theory within learning environments. The agent can teach students
using modalities compatible with the full range of interactive learning styles. It is also capable on
giving instruction in collaborative environments, with or without an instructor present. Beside
that, the agent could implements several functions such as presentation, student monitoring and
feedback, probing questions, hint, and explanations. Interaction between the pedagogical agent
and student is occurring while learning session in progress. The following topics illustrate the
various types of student-agents monitoring interactions that have been explored for this
research purpose.
a. Performing Demonstrations
Intelligent agents are suited to perform demonstrations tasks. When students are first
introduced to a topic, it is often necessary to demonstrate to them how to solve problems and
perform tasks. By having an agent demonstrate tasks, instead of simply showing a student a
video of the procedure, it is offers a number of advantages. Moreover, the student is free to
move around the environment, and view the demonstration from various perspective. If the
demonstration is being performed in a dynamic environment, the demonstration dynamically
adapts to the current state of the environment. This will allow the agent to demonstrate the
situation in different initial states. Besides, the agent also adapts their demonstrations according
to the actions of the user (Johnson, 2009).
b. Guide a student through a task
Guiding is similar to demonstration where it helps students unfamiliar with the task to work their
way through it. Agent also has the ability to guide a student through a task, such as intelligent
tutoring system do (Johnson, 2009). If the student performs an action that is inconsistent with
standard practice, the agent will interrupt the student and suggest an action to perform instead.
c. Assist the student by means of hints
The agent also can help to guide the student if he or she is unclear about what to do by giving
hints (Johnson, 2009). Usually hinting is available at any time, unless the student is being tested
proficiency with the skill being taught.
d. Employ leading questions
Expert instructors frequently use leading questions to make sure that students properly
understand the current situations as they are solving problem. By using intelligent agent, the
agent can also employ leading questions to probe students understanding (Johnson, 2009).

e. Capable of generating explanation as needed

Whenever the agent gives a hint, the students can ask Why to find out the rationale for the
hint. This agent is capable of generating explanations as needed by allowing a series of Why
questions, where each of it causes the agent to present hinger-level rationales, until it runs out
the rationales to give. Some agents also can generate unsolicited explanations if the student
makes a mistake or seems to be having difficulty deciding how to proceed with question.
f.

Generating emotive responses to student actions

Pedagogical agents are increasingly invested with the capability of generating emotive
responses to student actions. Emotive behaviors such as facial expressions and body language
can help engage and motivate the learner, and alleviate student frustration by appearing to
empathize with the learner.
All types of student-agent monitoring interactions that have mention above proficient on giving
instruction in collaborative environments, with or without an instructor present. By support of the
agent functionality it can teach students using modalities compatible with the full range of
interactive learning styles.

4.0 SYSTEM MODEL

Figure 4.1: Model of the intelligent agent for the prototype system

Figure 4.1 above shows the model of the intelligent agent for the prototype system. This model
is located at the interface level on the server side. The agent manages the interaction between
the student and the system by retrieving information and knowledge from the knowledge base.
The lecturers able to update their domain knowledge as well as quiz and question database.
Based on the model in the figure 4.1 below, intelligent agent is able to acquire and maintain its

own knowledge. It can learn from its user, the environment, its own experience, exploration of a
knowledge repository such as a database, or through observing or being instructed by other
agents. Even though the agent has an ability to learn independently, the developer must give
the agent some knowledge to start the learning process. Then the agent will be able to correct,
extend and autonomously update its initial knowledge base (Tecuci, 2008).
All agents have some type of knowledge base and an inference engine. The knowledge base
contains information about the subject knowledge domain; such as facts and concepts, and the
processes considered necessary to complete problems within the system. This module is the
most important element because without it, there is nothing to teach the student. Generally, it
requires significant knowledge engineering to represent a domain so that the pedagogical agent
able to access it.
The inference engine is a program or set of rules, which manipulates the data structures found
within the knowledge base in accordance with the current problem or function (Zahedi, 2010).
Meanwhile, the database of question and quiz contain questions and quizzes that will be
updated by the lecturer and used by the agents during the learning process.

5.0

IMPLEMENTATION

To facilitate web-based delivery, the prototype of the system is implemented using four webbased programming language and tools such as Allaire ColdFusion, Java, Java Script and
Visual Basic Script. The interface of pedagogical agent has been developed using Microsoft
Agent and other softwares packages for various purposes. After the development of the
prototype is complete, it will be tested to a group of student that study Object Oriented
Programming course. The results and marks they get will be comparing to other group of
student that not using the system. In addition, some questionnaire will also be distributed to
gather feedback from the student.
6.0

ADVANTAGES OF USING AN INTELLIGENT AGENT

The WWW provides users with a uniform and convenient means of assessing the vast
resources of the internet. The prototype of the systems provides an exciting new opportunity for
E-learning and E-teaching environment with the following advantages (Zakaria et al., 2005):
a. Consistency
The ability of the web-based educational system to quickly identify the student deficiencies from
the pattern of their responses, would allow the problem to be addressed more quickly than is
possible with a human tutor.
b. Interactive and Adaptive
Intelligent agent uses a browser as a universal client to provide intuitive, friendly, rich and
flexible user interface.
c. Save cost and time
Intelligent agent open and non-propriety concept assists the implementation of education
technology without high cost and technology barriers. It also reduces time and cost of traveling
to remote training facilities.

d. Make revisions easier

Students able to learn at their own place and time, and the content can be continually improved
and reused in order to students' requirements.
e. Distributed and Location Independent
With the availability of basic infrastructure or personal computers, instructors can deliver the
content to a large number of students without affecting the quality.

7.0

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RESEARCH

Integrating intelligent agent into web-based educational system is one of the important issues in
educational context. Benefits of web-based educational are clear, classroom and platform
independence. An application installed and supported in one location can be used by thousands
of learners globally. Although the evidence is still limited but very positive, intelligent
pedagogical agent has the potential to create a revolution in effective, low-cost education and
training. This is due the ability of the agents to emulate a human tutor as well as other
characteristics described in the previous section. However, one must realize that intelligent
pedagogical agent is just a tool that can be harnessing the web-based education. The
effectiveness of the agent depends on the quality of the underlying material and the pedagogical
framework used in the development of the web-based educational systems.

8.0

CONCLUSION

Pedagogical agents introduce a new paradigm for instruction that is based on concept of shared
abilities and cooperative learning between humans and computers. Aside from difficulties in
constructing intelligent agents for education, exploring the development of artificially animated
pedagogical agent is a worthy task that helps further our theoretical understanding of
instruction. In addition, there are several desirable features in a pedagogical tool such as
templates, branching, feedback, providing help to learner, ability to import graphics, ability to
distribute education globally, reporting capabilities, animation and testing shell (Moshinskie,
2012). As a conclusion, the application of pedagogical agents is an area that should be
explored by all schools and universities. If properly developed and fully utilized, this technology
could prove to be not just a solution for existing problems, but the resources could strengthen
the institutions competitive position.

9.0

FUTURE WORK

The future research directions would include strengthening the general theoretical framework for
agent-based educational system by developing a truly intelligent animated pedagogical agent.
The future pedagogical agents will resemble Malaysian character that will be integrated with a
Malay text-to-speech engine. The development of the Malay text-to-speech engine will be
among the first ever develop in Malaysia. For this future enhancement, factors such as gaze,
eye contact, body language, and emotional expression of the animated agent will be modeled
and exploited for instructional purposes.

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