A multi-agent system for online course content management

Abstract

This paper presents a multiagent system to assist a teacher managing his/her course contents placed on Web servers. In this system there is a set of agents and every agent may work independently from or collaboratively with others. Once generated, an agent can reside in a teacher's daily working computer (called administration host) or a proxy host, and can move between the two hosts. Each agent is devoted to one piece of job and all of them, as a whole, coordinately conduct a sequence of management work during the entire process of teaching a course. A teacher may administrate agents via a specific system shell on his/her administration host, or a usual Web browser on another computer/PDA/mobile phone. The system has been carefully modularized, and thus a new type of agent, if necessary, can be relatively easily developed and quickly incorporated into the system to further enhance or extend its management capability.