Uso de Agentes de Interface para adequacão de bate-papos ao contexto de Educacão a Distancia

An outstanding growth of Internet in the last years turned it into an important communication medium. In addition to that, distance education methods (EaD), characterized by a geographical separation between students and teachers, kept reaching an increasing amount of people with varying cultures around the world. With the application of distance education over the Internet, the use of Learning Management Systems (LMS) became a popular practice. As a result, EaD environments started to offer several tools for the creation, edition and attendance of courses like forums, electronic mail, chat, support material, along with others. Many authors point out the construction of a community sense as an important factor during a EaD process, because it influences the established relationship among course participants. In that sense, chat tools represent some of the best alternatives to help users constitute their identity in the learning community. However, current LMS s chat tools maintain the traditional web chats fundamental characteristics, which are not all appropriate for an educational purpose. Thus, the objective of this work is to build a chat tool suitable for an educational context, that should coordinate some LMS s synchronous conversations, focusing the TelEduc environment. An analysis of specialized literature and TelEduc users needs was made during the ChEd (Educational Chat) building process, in order to define some chat session coordination models. Together with those pre-defined models, the possibility of configuring a personalized one was also incorporated to the system, with the use of Interface Agents. Such feature aimed to provide better flexibility, by integrating Artificial Intelligence and Educational concepts. This work still presents the results of tests made using ChEd, that indicate the need of some upgrades

2003