A System to Support Tutors in Adapting Distance Learning Situations to Students

Currently, tutor’s roles in distance learning are not clearly defined and few tools support him/her in his/her functions. Some tools help tutors to monitor learners and interact with them, but no tools assist them in the setting-up of learning sessions. Activities are created by instructional designers who envisage standard scenarios without knowing the learners. Thus, the aim of our research project is to create a system to help tutors to adapt learning situations to learners’ needs and characteristics. The first phase of our work consists in determine tutor’s roles in collaborative distance learning, in order to identify his/her needs. Then, we implement an assistance system based on an ontology containing learners’ characteristics and parameters of learning situations. An inference engine creates links between these characteristics by reasoning on the ontology. Finally, some rules deduce relations between ontology elements in order to give the tutor advice.