An analysis of conversations in role-play training for project management education

The information technology industry has required universities to provide project management education. In Tokyo University of Technology, role-play training has been carried out as a part of project management education. We have been developing an on-line group work training system named PROMASTER (Project Management Skills Training Environment) which can gather the behavior records of each learner to realize PBE (Profile Based Education). Also we have developed a software agent system, named BONAMI (agent system Based ON Aggregated Mentoring and expert Intelligence for project management), which plays the role of an adviser, and monitors the behavior of each learner, when necessary encouraging a learner to take the action. However BONAMI cannot suggest that a learner takes the proper procedures in a timely manner. In this paper, we propose an instruction method for providing advice or a hint in a timely manner. The proposed method is based on the principle that “the correct solution should be derived through the correct orderly manner”. In particular, the method is to extract the conversation patterns from the chat messages and then to compare them to model patterns. According to the result of analyzing the actual conversation patterns, the learners´ acquired skill level was found to be positively correlated with the degree of the desirable patterns. This result suggests that the degree of desirable patterns might correspond to the correct orderly approach. Consequently the proposed method encourages learners to discuss in an orderly correct manner to arrive at a correct solution.