Towards an agent architecture to provide knowledge-based facilities for distance education

Information managed in distance education systems covers many different aspects: user-related information, course data, certifications, etc. Recently, several international institutions are attempting to develop common information schemas and associated semantics for all these types of data. The ensemble of these specifications provides an information scheme that is useful not only for the improvement of systems' management, but also to allow interoperability among different systems and reusability of learning resources. Taking this information base as the starting point, we have devised an agent-based architecture to provide knowledge-based facilities for distance education systems. Agents take advantage of the standardized semantics of the information to improve the learning process of the learners, both detecting learner problems and recommending new contents that can be suitable for his abilities or skills.