Using pedagogical agents to support collaborative distance learning

In this paper, we describe an animated pedagogical agent that assists the interaction among students in a virtual class within a collaborative communication tool, either on-line or not, motivating them, correcting wrong ideas and providing new information. This guiding agent, which we call Collaboration Agent, will consider not only the cognitive capabilities of students, but also social and affective ones; this becomes a more qualitative mechanism for collaboration among students and learning. The considered agent is being modelled as part of the multi-agent architecture of the project “A Computational Model of Distance Learning Based on Socio-Cultural Pedagogical Approaches” (Andrade et al, 2001).