Guardian agents to support student group projects

The paper describes the design of a set of agents intended to assist students undertaking group project work in a distributed environment. Increasing reliance on distance learning causes particular problems, as conventional monitoring techniques are often ineffective when group interactions may take a variety of different forms. Our objective is to monitor group activity and to provide assistance when the group appears to be at risk of failing to meet its objectives and then to offer advice on how the group can return to plan. If there is a serious risk of the group failing, appropriate members of the teaching staff are informed, together with the necessary logs to identify the problems. The initial design and construction of the agents is based on the ABW-Zeus methodology. Since all code generated is in Java, additional functionality can be added readily either by using class libraries or by adding Java code. This allows guardian agents to link effectively with existing Web based student learning environments