EXP: Collaborative Research: Fostering Ecologies of Online Learners through Technology Augmented Human Facilitation

Cyberlearning：Transforming Education项目汇集了计算语言学和计算机支持的协作学习的前沿研究人员，以探索设计智能对话代理的可行性问题，该智能对话代理在学习者一起工作时与学习者群体进行交互，并提供认知，元认知和社会建议以增强他们的合作。会话代理的目的是通过提供支持性建议以及促进对动态的认识来增强群体动态。 代理的设计是由元认知，协作学习和负责任的谈话的理论。除了研究如何设计这种代理并测试其有效性外，研究人员还在探索当会话代理可用于帮助进行富有成效的谈话时，学习如何发展，会话行为对发展理解和行动的影响，以及影响理解和行为的方式。MOOCs），是与教师和同行的个人接触。虽然许多正规教育的重点是教师在讲座中与大群学生的互动，但许多学生的学习取决于与教师和助教的互动以及与同龄人的讨论，学习课程和项目工作。只有在我们知道如何为在线学习者提供这些支持之后，大规模在线教育才会取得广泛的成功。 这个项目的重点是设计一个交互式代理，可以提供会话支持的小团体合作的学生，帮助他们有效地解决问题，一起学习。 该代理被设计为提供教师或教学助理将提供的建议，如果这样的人类导师可用。研究人员推测，有了这样的支持，在线学生可以为彼此提供各种学习的社会支持，这些支持有助于学生在高等教育中的学习体验。该代理正在几个不同的在线课程中进行部署和测试。预计结果将适用于大规模在线教育以及混合教育环境，如翻转和基于项目的教室。

This Cyberlearning: Transforming Education project brings together leading-edge researchers in computational linguistics and computer-supported collaborative learning to explore feasibility issues in designing an intelligent conversational agent that interacts with groups of learners as they are working together and provides cognitive, meta-cognitive, and social advice to enhance their collaborations. The conversational agent is being designed to enhance group dynamics by providing supportive advice as well as promoting awareness of the dynamics. Design of the agent is informed by theories of meta-cognition, collaborative learning, and accountable talk. In addition to investigating how to design such agents and testing their effectiveness, investigators are exploring how learning develops when a conversational agent is available to help with productive talk, the influences of conversational behaviors on developing understanding and actions, and ways of influencing understanding and behaviors.One of the biggest limitations of online education, especially massive online courses (e.g., MOOCs), is personal contact with instructors and peers. While much of formal education focuses on faculty interactions with large groups of students in lectures, much student learning depends on interactions with teachers and teaching assistants and discussions, study sessions, and project work done with peers. Massive online education will be broadly successful only after we know how to provide these kinds of supports to online learners. This project focuses on designing an interactive agent that can provide conversational support for small groups of collaborating students to help them productively solve problems and learn together. The agent is being designed to provide the kinds of advice that a teacher or teaching assistant would provide if such a human mentor were available. The researchers conjecture that with such support available, online students can provide for each other the kinds of social supports for learning that contribute in integral ways to students' learning experiences in higher education. The agent is being deployed and tested in several different online courses. Results are expected to be applicable to massive online education as well as to blended educational environments such as flipped and project-based classrooms.