Using Pedagogical Agents to Support Collaborative Distance Learning

In this paper, we describe an animated pedagogical agent which assists the interaction among students in a virtual class within a collaborative communication tool, either on-line or not, motivating them, correcting wrong concepts and providing new knowledge. This guiding agent we call Collaboration Agent will consider not only cognitive capabilities of students, but also social and affective characteristics, which becomes a more qualitative mechanism for collaboration among students and learning. The considered agent is being modelled as part of the multi-agent architecture of the project "A Computational Model of Distance Learning Based on Socio-Cultural Pedagogical Approaches".