Federated Agent-Based Architecture for Collaborative Education Model

This chapter presents the development of a conceptual, operational, and software architecture of a col-laborative education model. The purpose of the model is to provide efficient communication services and an open scalable architecture for the uniform publication, management, and dissemination of distributed educational material developed by geographically dispersed educational providers, while maintaining the autonomy of the participating providers. Promotion of educational expertise, especially through expansion of specialisation, is of increasing importance. Within the educational arena, big providers tend to dominate the market, at the expense of smaller ones. For small providers, specialization within disciplines, coupled with collaboration among other providers might be the key to their survival. Intra-discipline specialization would promote development of quality services, and inter-provider collaboration would enable wide offering of these services. The proposed paradigm would require the development of a suitable model to support it. The model proposed in this chapter is a federation of independent providers that are loosely coupled to facilitate collaboration, and sharing and exchanging of information. The federated model, supported by agent-based communication over the Internet, can operate across geographical, cultural and organisational boundaries while promoting integration within those boundaries. Because of its potential ability to cross the various boundaries, the proposed model seems particularly applicable to distance education environments.