Incorporating context-awareness services in adaptive U-MAS learning environments

Abstract

The context-awareness concept, which is inherent to humans when performing any learning activity, becomes the main component for monitoring activities in virtual learning environments. The aim of this paper is to incorporate context-awareness services within an adaptive ubiquitous Multi-Agent System (U-MAS) learning environment intended for instructional planning and educational resource recommendation. The awareness agent developed that composes the system architecture provides the functionality that involves several contextawareness services. This characteristic allows both students and teachers at a given time be aware of their learning progress status during U-MAS execution. In order to validate the incorporation of context-aware services a prototype was built and tested through a case study. Results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of using this kind of approaches in virtual learning environments which constitutes an attempt to improve learning processes.