MyEnglishTeacher: VOD based Distance Academic English Teaching via an adaptive, multi-Agent Environment

As English spreads as the new international language for all domains, be it economics, politics, education, research, and so on, it becomes increasingly important to facilitate English upgrading for people everywhere. In this way, language barriers can be lifted, and international communication enhanced. The recent growth and expansion of the Internet allows us to build distance education systems today. However, uniform level education for everybody proved to be a wrong approach. Distance teaching misses one important factor: the teacher: flexible, adaptive, and more important, human. The advances made in the artificial intelligence (AI), as well as in the technological field recently, allow us to implement, if not human-like automatic teachers, at least adaptive, flexible, and individual user needs oriented learning environments. We propose in this paper a new approach to English upgrading and new student adaptation mechanisms that we support theoretically and with examples. Moreover, the present paper presents systematically the background, rationale, design, implementation and preliminary testing and evaluation of the prototype of such a free, Internet-based, agent-based, long-distance teaching environment for academic English upgrading, with special focus on the learning environment and learner adaptability.