Teaching, an emergent property of eLearning environments

This paper offers to the discussion the claim that educating function of a system is an emerging property of the interactions organised between several different types of specialised agents including human tutors. A project implementing these ideas is then quickly presented. The evolution of the ideas in the field of learning technologies could be sketched as follows: the initial paradigm was to design Intelligent Tutoring Systems as autonomous machines with strong instructional functionalities and some sort of modelling of learners' needs and cognitive characteristics, a second paradigm, about ten years later, has been that of the development of learning environments opening to the learner a real space for the exploration and the construction of knowledge. The former has not led to clear success, while the latter has evidenced serious difficulties and the need to complement the environment by teachers input and guidance [1]. In summary, if teaching being reduced to instruction is not the more successful avenue, the absence of teaching features in a learning environment, which has been stressed during the last decade, does not guaranty either the quality of the learning output. What is the lesson? Clearly the need to search for a new paradigm which could ensure a better equilibrium between learning and teaching, between human and machines [2]. The reasons why the learner, either a child or an adult, needs "teaching inputs" are very often hidden as a corollary of the emphasis on—and possibly the misunderstanding of—the constructivist principles of design of learning environments. We claim here that these needs are especially important in the case of modern environments which are largely distributed and provide a potential access to a huge range of knowledge and information. The following questions illustrate some of the issues that learners may have to face when left on their own in the wild web on the digital resources: "How to look for something you don't know? ", "How to know that what you have found is what you were looking for? ", "How to know that you have learned?". Here are some of the issues that a teaching assistant should help to address. An other crucial question is: "How will others know that you know?" It is not enough that learners have solved problems for them to understand that they have learned. Creative problem-solving which is at the core of the constructivist approach is so rich in new intellectual constructs that …