Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Teaching and Learning (ICTL 2011)
INTI International University, Malaysia
INTELLIGENT COURSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (ICMS)
Yogeswaran Nathan1 and Jeyarani Periasamy2
INTI International University, Malaysia
(1yoges.nathan@newinti.edu.my, 2jeyarai.periasamy@newinti.edu.my)
ABSTRACT
This research investigated the effects of applying intelligent agent techniques to a course management system
(iCMS) for distance learning environment. The agent (e-agent) created for the research was an intelligent
software agent that automated the repetitive tasks of human facilitators such as sending reminders before the due
date and notifying those students who are not active in the forum.
This study used experimental groups and comparison groups to examine the association between the use of eagent and the assignment submission rates. Also examined were the effects of e-agent on the other factors such
as online participation and learner satisfaction and motivation level. The findings indicated that the use of eagent is positively associated with higher learners’ submission rates of assignments. In addition, e-agent
implemented a learning-support tool that reminded learners about deadlines. The supporting e-agent was found
to be effective autonomous motivators. In sum, the results of this research suggest that the application of e-agent
technology to distance learning holds promise in improving the completion rates and the submission of
assignments, learner satisfaction, and motivation.
KEYWORDS
Intelligent agent, Course management system, e-Agent, Autonomous
INTRODUCTION
Course Management System (CMS) appears to work best when there is a high level of online
facilitation. Students appreciate immediate feedback and the ability to be reminded and
notified. This finding has been shown in several CMS venues [1], [2]. This research paper
describes a series of experiments designed to evaluate ways by which online courses can be
improved by the introduction of autonomous intelligent software agents.
Intelligent Agents (IAs), termed “e-agent”, is a program that uses intelligent agent techniques
to provide assistance to the instructors which can perform the duties of instructors for routine
tasks. Checking important dates and reminding students about the need to turn in assignments
and potentially even notifying the inactive students are among the types of things that
intelligent agents can accomplish.
The different brands of Course Management System (CMS) range from homegrown software
environments to sophisticated commercial products. Although the new versions include easyto-use Web authoring tools, most of them offer passive services. As a result, some instructors
spent more time teaching a distance-learning course than teaching the same course in a
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Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Teaching and Learning (ICTL 2011)
INTI International University, Malaysia
classroom setting. This problem results mostly from the time consuming operational nature of
online courses. For instance, the instructor is expected to check student progress regularly by
visiting many web pages and using different tools within the Course Management System to
verify the student progress and participation. These include monitoring the forum activity log
to verify student participation, consulting the drop-bin tool to see if students have submitted
assignments, and visit the course activity log regularly to monitor the magnitude of students’
online activities. Performing these tasks in addition to handling hundreds of e-mail messages
have become a major time-consuming operation for most instructors. Intelligent agents
functioning within a CMS system or a campus portal could perform some of these tasks,
relieving the instructor from manually monitoring and managing course activities.
Until recently, a major requirement of any CMS was ease of use. However, this no longer
seems to be the main concern [4]. We need smart learning environments that offer personal
services with the capabilities to learn, reason, have autonomy, and be totally dynamic. Using
intelligent agents in a course management environment can overcome some of the current
limitations of CMS systems. For instance, once a course instructor logs into the course
environment, a teaching assistant agent could provide information such as the names of the
students who have overdue assignments, have not collaborated in the forum, have not taken
an online quiz, or have not signed on for several days. The course instructor can configure an
agent to give it autonomy to send personal e-mails to those students who have not submitted
their assignments or are inactive in the forum participation.
This research was conducted to study the concept that autonomous intelligent agents can
improve the learning effectiveness of iCMS and learner satisfaction while simultaneously
increase the assignment submission rate and motivation level. The primary hypothesis was
that introduction of intelligent agents would increase the assignment submission rate in the
iCMS online courses that are offered. The rationale for the choice of this measure is that
online learning courses often suffer from a large number of students who fail to submit all the
assignments on time.
iCMS is a distance education with about 50 students (pilot run). In fulfilling its mission, the
college has adopted various Web based and electronic means to support distance learning.
For instance, iCMS uses a Web based course management system (CMS) to provide students
with the course materials in a flexible way. Apart from the traditional print-based course
materials and textbooks, the college’s staff and instructors use the Web portal to deliver
assignment files, make course announcements, monitor the forum and have other
correspondence with students. Online discussion forums provide students with a convenient
place to ask questions and receive answers from the teaching staff and classmates.
An electronic assignment handling system administers the student assignments. Before the
due date of the assignments, the e-agent will check the course calendar on the due dates and
send a reminder to the students and the instructors to ensure that the assignments will be
submitted on time. Assignments, which have been marked and commented on, are considered
an important element in the distance learning process. The assignment handling system
enables the students to submit their assignments electronically, apply for an extension,
inquire about the status of their submitted assignments, and receive timely feedback on
assignments from the teaching staff. The e-agent will check for the last date of the marking
submission date from the course calendar and notify the instructors on the due date to avoid
any delay.
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Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Teaching and Learning (ICTL 2011)
INTI International University, Malaysia
Clearly, the Web-based Course Management System provides many benefits to the service of
distance education. However, it is also fair to say that the current ways that we use and
interact with the Course Management System are not ideal. Employing a human teaching
assistant to relieve academic staff from manually monitoring and managing course activities
is one way to improve the process, but it s not effective and efficient. To increase the
efficiency of learning, a software agent should be employed to act as a teaching assistant to
the e-instructors.
A useful definition of an intelligent agent is given by Lieberman [6]:
 An intelligent agent is any program that can be considered by the user to be acting as an
assistant or helper, rather than as a tool in the manner of a conventional direct
manipulation interface. An agent should as well display some, but perhaps not all, of the
characteristics that are associated with human intelligence: learning, inference,
adaptability, independence, creativity, etc.
Etzioni and Weld defined the term “software agent” as a computer program that behaves
in a manner analogous to a human agent [7]. In essence, the term refers to software that
supports a social interface metaphor  a dialogue between a person and the agent.
Various researchers proposed the following characteristics as the desirable qualities of
software agents [8].
 Autonomy: An agent initiates and exercises control over its own actions in the following
ways:
 Goal-oriented: accepts high-level requests indicating what a human wants and is
responsible for deciding how and when to satisfy the requests.
 Collaborative: does not blindly obey commands but can modify requests, ask
clarification questions, or even refuse to satisfy certain requests.
 Flexible: actions are not scripted; the agent is able to dynamically choose which actions
to invoke, and in what sequence, in response to the state of its external environment.
 Self-starting: unlike standard programs directly invoked by the user, an agent can sense
changes in its environment and decide when to act.
 Temporal continuity: An agent is a continuously running process, not a one-shot
computation that maps a single input to a single output and then terminates.

Personality: An agent has a well-defined believable personality that facilitates
interaction with human users.
 Communication ability: An agent can engage in complex communication with other
agents, including people, to obtain information or enlist help to accomplish its goals.
 Adaptability: An agent automatically customizes itself to the preferences of its user on
the basis of previous experience. It also automatically adapts to changes in its
environment.
 Mobility: An agent can transport itself from one machine to another and across
different system architectures and platforms.
Although no single agent has all these characteristics, several prototype agents embody a
substantial fraction of them. There is little agreement about the relative importance of
different properties, but most researchers agree that these are the characteristics that
differentiate agents from single programs [7].
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Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Teaching and Learning (ICTL 2011)
INTI International University, Malaysia
Selker provided another definition of intelligent agents that is close to the use of the term in
this paper [8]. He defined agents as computer programs that simulate a human relationship,
by doing something that another person could otherwise do it for you. For the purposes of
iCMS, the e-agent behaviors simulate what e-instructors could do, including the following:
 Remind students of assignment submission and due dates by referring to the course
calendar
 After the assignment due date, notify the e-instructors and those students who have not
submitted their assignments.
 Monitor the progress of tutors in marking assignments to ensure that the submitted
assignments are marked, commented and entered into the OMES (Online Mark Entering
System) within an established period of time.
 Identify inactive students (forum) and contact them for proactive consultation.
 Encourage students to complete assignments, tasks or other learning requirements.
The term “e-agent” is used throughout this paper to define a program that uses intelligent
agent techniques to provide assistance to e-instructors dealing with facilitation tasks as well
as to the students dealing with assignments, submission and online participation.
The basic goal of the research is to investigate how the course management system (CMS)
can improve the assignment submission rate of students in iCMS distance learning courses
and to motivate the students to participate actively in the forum. The reasons for choosing this
goal are threefold:
(1) Sending alert messages and emailing to remind students will help to increase the
assignment submission rate and avoid last-minute work. Thus, assignment submission
rate is a strong indicator of students in doing their task as required.
(2) Reminding and encouraging the students to participate in the forum can motivate them
students to involve actively in the forum.
(3) Monitoring the course announcements and notifying the students will avoid them
student from missing any important notices such as quiz, test and assignment due dates.
RELATED WORK
The need to link pedagogy to the prevailing technological infrastructure was highlighted by
Mergendoller [Men 1996] and Roschelle [Ros 1999]. However, they emphasized the need for
additional new frameworks for online learning. To meet this requirement, several researchers
have offered different solutions. Bonk offered the frameworks for learner-centered web
instructions in [Bon 1998]. In [Bon 2001], he wrote about the integration of the web in
instruction and the role of online instructors, while Cummings in [Cum, 2002] detailed the
types and forms of interaction made possible by the growth of the web.
A number of researchers have proposed the development of software agents in teaching and
learning situations:
Clara Ines Pena Carrilo [4] proposed the application of intelligent agents in web-based
learning environments that may be used to improve the guidance given to the user, while
increasing user motivation and adaptability of the course materials.
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Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Teaching and Learning (ICTL 2011)
INTI International University, Malaysia
Jafari [3] conceptualized three types of software agents to assist teachers and students:
 Digital Teaching Assistant – assists the human teacher in various teaching functions
 Digital Tutor – helps students with specific learning needs
 Digital Secretary – acts as a secretary to assist students and teachers with various
logistical and administrative needs
This research paper involves the first type of software agent.
Razek et al. [13] proposed the application of software agents to provide distance learning
students with timely and useful information in a group discussion. The software agent they
built can observe conversations among a distance learning community, interpret the
community’s input, organize the information, and then present information useful to the
students in their current activities.
This research paper also proposes using software agents to make the communication in a
distance learning community more effective. However, focus is on the collaboration or
participation in the forum between instructors and students. The software agent built is
designed to work on behalf of instructors, assisting them in communicating more effectively
and closely with students.
Suzuki and Yamamoto [12] proposed an agent-based distance learning system for effective
delivery of distance learning courses. Their system provides a personalization service to each
set of courseware, allowing it to customize its content and present materials in a contextsensitive way.
Distance learning considered from a learner perspective basically involves four types of
interactions:
 Learner-to-interfaces
 Learner-to-content
 Learner-to-learner
 Learner-to-instructor [14]
Suzuki and Yamamoto’s work [9] focused on using software agents to enhance the first two
types of interactions for a distance education course. Razek et al.’s work [10] contributed to
the third type of interactivity factor. This paper proposes applying a software agent to
enhance the fourth type of interactivity factor in a distance education environment – learnerto-instructor interaction.
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Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Teaching and Learning (ICTL 2011)
INTI International University, Malaysia
CONCLUSIONS
The current course management systems would benefit from the development of agent based
technology. The resulting intelligent course management system uses a variety of agents to
offer a dynamic and smart learning environment. This thesis conceptualizes two types of
intelligent agents which could assist the e-instructors and the course coordinator. We found
that using intelligent agent in the course management system showed a very positive
association with a high completion rate of assignment submission. However, due to the fact
that the research is co-relational in nature, we cannot assert that the use of e-agents has a
direct effect on the submission rate. Nevertheless, we can say that (1) there was a dramatic
increase in the submission rate if e-agent was employed, and (2) majority of the students
demonstrated a positive attitude toward using the e-agent, specifically as a tool that helped
motivate them to submit the assignments on time.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
At a moment like this, I find this to be the most difficult section to write. I cannot find the word to express my
thanks to so many people who have offered unconditional help to me during the long road of suffering and joy,
which I decided to follow to carry out this research project.
First of all, thank you God since I would not have done anything without you.
To my husband, parents and siblings for their support and motivation in the more difficult moments.
To my supervisor, Dr. Zainuddin Hassan, for believing in me and allowing me to develop with interest and
dedication the topic of this thesis which has pleased me so much.
Special thanks to Ms.Kavitha and Ms.Regina (for always being there and willing to help me).
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INTI International University, Malaysia
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Sheung-On Choy (sochoy@ouhk.edu.hk) is a lecturer of Applied Computing in the
School of Science and Technology at the Open University of Hong Kong. Sin-Chun Ng is
an assistant professor, and Yiu-Chung Tsang is a technical assistant, at the same
institution.
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