eTeacher: Providing personalized assistance to e-learning students

0360-1315/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Ltd doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2008.05.008 * Corresponding author. Address: ISISTAN Researc Aires, Argentina. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S. Sc In this paper we present eTeacher, an intelligent agent that provides personalized assistance to e-learning students. eTeacher observes a student’s behavior while he/she is taking online courses and automatically builds the student’s profile. This profile comprises the student’s learning style and information about the student’s performance, such as exercises done, topics studied, exam results. In our approach, a student’s learning style is automatically detected from the student’s actions in an e-learning system using Bayesian networks. Then, eTeacher uses the information contained in the student profile to proactively assist the student by suggesting him/her personalized courses of action that will help him/her during the learning process. eTeacher has been evaluated when assisting System Engineering students and the results obtained thus far are promising. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.