Collaborative Working e-Learning Environments Supported by Rule-Based e-Tutor

Abstract

Collaborative working environments for distance education sets a goal of convenience and an adaptation into our technologically advanced societies. To achieve this revolutionary new way of learning, environments must allow the different participants to communicate and coordinate with each other in a productive manner. Productivity and efficiency is obtained through synchronized communication between the different coordinating partners, which means that multiple users can execute an experiment simultaneously. Within this process, coordination can be accomplished by voice communication and chat tools. In recent times, multi-user environments have been successfully applied in many applications such as air traffic control systems, team-oriented military systems, chat text tools, and multi-player games. Thus, understanding the ideas and the techniques behind these systems can be of great significance regarding the contribution of newer ideas to collaborative working e-learning environments. However, many problems still exist in distance learning and tele-education, such as not finding the proper assistance while performing the remote experiment. Therefore, the students become overwhelmed and the experiment will fail. In this paper, we are going to discuss a solution that enables students to obtain an automated help by either a human tutor or a rule-based e-tutor (embedded rule-based system) for the purpose of student support in complex remote experimentative environments. The technical implementation of the system can be realized by using the powerful Microsoft .NET, which offers a complete integrated developmental environment (IDE) with a wide collection of products and technologies. Once the system is developed, groups of students are independently able to coordinate and to execute the experiment at any time and from any place, organizing the work between them positively.