HIDE: Hybrid Intelligence-based Distance Education

This paper proposes a new concept called hybrid intelligencebased distance education (HIDE). The idea of HIDE is to combine human intelligence and machine intelligence to enhance a large scale teacher-student interaction for the webbased distance education. The long term goal is to achieve unnoticeable merging of human intelligence and machine intelligence to maximally enhance teacher-student interaction in distributed environments. In a HIDE system, teacherstudent interaction is assisted by the avatars of the teacher and students. The avatars have the functionality of realtime speech-driven face animation, which provides an effective and efficient solution for large scale “face-to-face” communication The avatars of the teacher possess certain degree of intelligence. They can answer simple questions of the students so that they help reduce the load of the teacher. The avatars of the teacher will direct the questions to the teacher if the questions are beyond their capabilities. The avatars of the teacher also help to monitor the students and collect information for the teacher. The teacher avatar can automatically analyze the teacher-student interaction with respect to the course materials.