Cooperative Agent-Supported Learning with WeLearn

Distance Education sometimes suffers from the problem that the environment is powerful, but also complicated to learn and to use. This detracts from the learning process and poses and initial barrier against widespread acceptance. Also, creating teaching material (and holding courses) is more difficult and timeconsuming than in conventional form because of new possibilities and additional user expectations. We propose the integration of intelligent agents into learning platforms to ameliorate some of these problems by automating routine tasks and creating added value by themselves (e. g. creating new navigational paths or offering personalised simple coaching). These agents cannot and should not replace coaches, but rather ease their tasks and fulfil additional ones, which were not doable before. The importance of metadata for agent-integration is also touched briefly accompanied by a discussion of the applicability of agent-oriented engineering for online learning platforms.