Facilitation of Online Student Group Projects with a Support Agent

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.

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