Jean-Mathias Heraud

Teaching with game-based learning management systems: Exploring a pedagogical dungeon

The work reported here takes place in the educational domain. The authors propose a learning environment based on a graphical representation of a course. The emergence of online multiplayer games led the authors to apply the following metaphor to the digital work environments: The method of acquiring knowledge during a learning session is similar to the exploration of a dungeon, where each student collects knowledge related to a learning activity. In the first part of this article, the authors focuses on a description of how concepts of learning activities can be represented in the dungeon view. The second part deals with the support of the observation task for the teacher during a learning session and more generally with providing users with awareness. The authors thus propose a multiagent system using data collected from traces resulting from the collaborative learning activity. Finally, this environment allowed the authors to set up experiments with students at their university.

Helping the Teacher to Re-Organize Tasks in a Collaborative Learning Activity: An Agent-Based Approach

Our work aims at providing teachers with an observation tool making the learning task flexible and more adaptive. The main point of this paper deals with an agent approach to support the observation task of the teacher during a learning session. A multi-agent system architecture is proposed and discussed.

Help through visualization to compare learners' activities to recommended learning scenarios

We are interested in the observation of learner behavior in learning environments in order to compare it to a recommended learning scenario. This paper deals with visualization as a means for observation. Indeed, the visualization can bring different functionalities and we are particularly interested in two of them: first to make the visualization aid the user to better explain the learners activities by highlighting relevant information; second, to manipulate data to add some semantics on them. We present some visualization techniques adapted to our purpose, based on results previously obtained in an experiment.