Um sistema multiagente de apoio à Gestão de Cursos EaD em um ambiente virtual de aprendizagem

Abstract

With the continued and increasing use of Learning Management System (LMS) in educational institutions, it is necessary for coordinators and administrators effectively manage the online courses in order to ensure good monitoring and superior levels looking for ways to improve the management of online courses. Thus, considering the difficulties in the aspect of infrastructure and time to become familiar with the resources available, the researchers realized the need to know the opinion of people with experience in Distance Education and higher level positions to decision-making. During the investigation of the problem, was held collection and analysis of information on the performance of LMS in the follow-up courses process. The results revealed the need to implement a tool that would help the monitoring of online courses. Based on this information, this paper proposes and describes an approach based on a Multi-Agent System for this problem. The system has the purpose to support the management of online courses through intelligent agents. From the use of the proposed system, the coordinator of an online courses get condensed and quick information of each current course, facilitating managerial vision by reporting and organized graphics, and receive periodically a message via email about the current status of each course. Thus, intelligent agents show specific situations of access students, tutors and teachers, and help the follow-up activities. To validate the work, was carried out a case study in the postgraduate courses in online mode with several real disciplines concurrently taking place in a Federal Institute of Education (IFE) of Amazonas state. The case study aimed evaluate the feasibility of the proposal, and from the results obtained in the test can be concluded that with using the developed system was possible to improve the monitoring of levels of online courses, assist in making decisions and thus enable the adoption of new teaching strategies