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

这个网络学习：转变教育项目汇集了计算语言学和计算机支持的协作学习领域的前沿研究人员，探讨了设计一种智能对话代理的可行性问题，该代理可以在学习者群体合作时与他们互动，并提供认知、元认知和社交建议，以加强他们的合作。对话代理的设计是为了通过提供支持性建议和促进对动态的认识来增强群体动态。主体的设计受到元认知理论、协作学习理论和责任谈话理论的启发。除了研究如何设计此类代理并测试其有效性外，研究人员还在探索当会话代理可以帮助进行富有成效的谈话时，学习是如何发展的，会话行为对理解和行动的发展的影响，以及影响理解和行为的方式。在线教育，特别是大规模在线课程(如MOOC)的最大限制之一是与教师和同龄人的个人接触。虽然许多正规教育侧重于教师在课堂上与大量学生互动，但学生的学习在很大程度上依赖于与教师和助教的互动，以及讨论、学习会议和与同行完成的项目工作。只有在我们知道如何为在线学习者提供这些支持之后，大规模的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代理，它可以为小组合作的学生提供对话支持，帮助他们高效地解决问题和共同学习。该代理的设计目的是提供教师或助教提供的建议，如果有这样的人类导师的话。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，这些社会支持对学生在高等教育中的学习体验做出了不可或缺的贡献。该代理正在几个不同的在线课程中进行部署和测试。研究结果预计将适用于大规模在线教育，以及翻转和基于项目的课堂等混合教育环境。

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.