A Framework for Building Emotional-Motivational Agents as Intelligent Tutoring Entities

Abstract

This chapter presents our efforts to integrate role theory and agent technology in order to support collaborative work/learning processes between users spatially distributed within a synchronous collaborative virtual environment. Our work aims to overcome a major inconvenience in distance education systems: tutors’ difficulties when following up a distance collaborative learning process and in particular those students who cannot keep up progress with their team-mates. Our approach embraces the learning paradigms mentioned above and the work on pedagogical and intelligent agents as a mechanism for modelling and analyzing student-tutor interactions.