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

这个网络学习：教育转型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，探索设计一个智能会话代理的可行性问题，该智能会话代理可以在学习者群体一起工作时与他们互动，并提供认知、元认知和社会建议，以加强他们的协作。会话代理的设计目的是通过提供支持性建议和提高对动态的认识来增强群体动态。代理的设计由元认知理论、协作学习理论和负责任的谈话理论指导。除了研究如何设计这样的代理和测试它们的有效性之外，研究人员还在探索当会话代理可用来帮助进行富有成效的谈话时，学习是如何发展的，会话行为对发展理解和行动的影响，以及影响理解和行为的方法。在线教育，尤其是大规模在线课程（如MOOCs）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批学生的互动，但学生的学习很大程度上取决于与教师和助教的互动，以及与同龄人的讨论、学习会议和项目工作。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式代理，它可以为小组协作的学生提供会话支持，帮助他们有效地解决问题并一起学习。该代理被设计为提供教师或助教在有人类导师时提供的各种建议。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，这些支持以整体的方式为学生在高等教育中的学习体验做出贡献。该代理正在几个不同的在线课程中进行部署和测试。预计研究结果将适用于大规模在线教育，以及翻转课堂和项目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.