An Advising System for Supporting Users of Collaborative Activities in LMSs

Learning management systems (LMSs) provide their users with the appropriate environments and tools to author, monitor and engage in collaborative learning activities. The unstructured collaboration spaces and the domain-independent interfaces of those platforms, pose restrictions to the analysis and the evaluation of the collaboration learning process. In this work is presented the design of an advising system, which aims to guide the users of the collaborative activities in a lesson in a LMS, by issuing recommendations and advices on the collaborative learning process. The system uses a fuzzy model to evaluate the learning behaviors of the learners and groups in the collaborative activities across several dimensions. An intelligent agent issues advices and recommendations to the learners and groups of the lesson based on their learning behaviors. The system aims to facilitate management of the collaborative activities in a LMS, by advising the instructors on the design of the collaborative learning experiences and also the learners on self-regulating their learning behaviors. The intelligent system has been partially developed using the Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) for the collaborative activities of Learning Activity Management System (LAMS).