This descriptive study looked into Persian learners’ autonomy and its ties with in-class group dynamics. The participants were undergraduate learners and M.A. students together with their teachers. Data were collected, using a questionnaire, on the participants’ beliefs about autonomy, their autonomous behaviors, and their perceptions of group norms and group cohesiveness. Corresponding teacher...

The aim of the current study was to investigate whether Podcasts would have an effect on Iranian autonomous and non-autonomous EFL learners’ listening comprehension ability at pre-intermediate level. For this purpose, 60 Iranian pre-intermediate EFL learners at some Iranian institutes participated in the experiment of the study. Then they were divided into two groups based on an OPT and a...

  Abstract Autonomy is the ability to take charge of one’s own learning. However, this ability is not inborn and must be acquired by formal instruction (Holec, 1981). Therefore, to offer a systematic approach to the devel-opment of learner autonomy in language learning process, Benson (2001) argues that learner autonomy is described in terms of learners’ control over the three dimensions of lea...

The challenge facing TeleLearning and Distance Education is to support the essentially autonomous knowledge building process by the learner, while at the same time, emphasizing the very important collaborative dimension of learning. This challenge cannot be met without information technology and without the integration of all the useful synchronous and asynchronous technologies in a coherent ar...

In this paper, we model a community of autonomous agents in which each agent acts in the environment following some relational action model [4] describing the effect to be expected when applying a given action in a given state. At some given moment, the underlying action model is only imperfectly known by agents and may have to be revised according to the unexpected effect of the current action...

Project-based language teaching (PBLT) provides a number of potential language learning benefits through opportunities for authentic meaningful language use. Previous research has also indicated how PBLT can encourage student motivation and develop learner autonomy. However, mixed findings have been found when implementing PBLT in Asian contexts. The aim of this study was to describe the develo...

In a virtual environment for the learning of cooperative tasks, learners have to coordinate with one or more autonomous agents in order to perform a task. This coordination requires that the human and agent team members reason and dialogue about their resources, action plans, and shared actions. This article proposes a new agent architecture called PCBDI designed to generate reactive, proactive...

Educational robotics are learning and teaching tools which can effectively promote exploratory learning and investigative work within several disciplines as Science, Technology and Design, Mathematics. The potential of these technologies can be developed within a learner-centered environment based on the constructivist approach. Besides building and programming autonomous robots is an ideal con...

This paper presents a model for the autonomous learning of smooth pursuit eye movements based on an efficient coding criterion for active perception. This model accounts for the joint development of visual encoding and eye control. Sparse coding models encode the incoming data at two different spatial resolutions and capture the statistics of the input in spatio-temporal basis functions. A rein...

This work introduces new results on early-vocal development in infants and machines using artificial intelligent agents. It is addressed using the perspective of intrinsically-motivated learning algorithms for autonomous exploration. The agent autonomously selects goals to explore its own sensorimotor system in regions where a certain competence measure is maximized. Unlike previous experiments...