Designing a MOOC as an Agent-Platform Aggregating Heterogeneous Virtual Learning Environments

Wautelet, Yves [KU Leuven] Heng, Samedi [UCL] Kolp, Manuel [UCL] Penserini, Loris [Istituto Tecnico Commerciale “Cesare Battisti”, Italy] Poelmans, Stephan [KU Leuven]

With the emergence of cloud technologies on the one hand and social networks on the other hand, the possibilities for e-learning have been considerably enhanced in the latest years. Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) can now indeed contain a huge amount of learning resources; in parallel large user communities are available in social networks. Nevertheless, these systems remain different but, by using these heterogeneous software environments together, the possibilities for interaction could be multiplied. That is why, this paper suggests building a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) environment through a Multi-Agent System (MAS) working as a virtual abstraction layer over heterogeneous software platforms. The idea is to aggregate different traditional VLE to dispose of the learning objects they own as well as other platforms like social networks to furnish an easy access to the MOOC of their large user communities. The MAS design and implementation has been architectured around a real-life organizational pattern – the joint venture – allowing us to deal with the complexity of heterogeneous software environments in the fashion that real-life companies join governance and management. Communication scenarios issued from a field analysis are pointed out in the paper; these are supported by the MOOC platform in the native environment as well as in Facebook. The proposal is indeed validated through the development of a prototype using Facebook as a case study for third-party platform interfacing. We finally highlight the benefits for the user experience.