Abstract   

A current area of teaching and learning research within our School is in reviewing and incorporating existing methods as well as developing new methods to produce a large scale software-based mentoring system which will benefit students as they progress through their university course. This system is being developed in Java and incorporates the disciplines of network communication, database management, user interface design and software agents and a pedagogy from the Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) and Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) fields of education. The system will be Web-aware and will operate cognisant of the large number of online units available from our School.

The research hopes to determine if this software agent based system can be designed, developed and successfully applied in a real-world environment. The system will employ re-usable communicating software agents and enable a student to "program" new information retrieval or management tasks via the software agents to help them in their university courses.

Agent technology, though maturing, is still young and has yet to show success in large scale, real-world, non-trivial applications.

This review discusses the origins of Software Agents and then investigates their applicability to the so that the potential benefits of using them in the teaching and learning context in general may be ascertained.

Keywords   

WWW, world wide web, mentor, software agents, review, educational technology, active learning

Availability   

A PostScript version of this document is available via http://www.cs.curtin.edu.au/~raytrace/papers/ajet/html/ajet.ps