A Cooperative Training Support System Balancing Mutual Encourage and Burden of Two Learners

Abstract

With the progress of sensing, computing, communication technologies, ubiquitous computing becomes a hot topic in the research field, by which various kinds of services can be provided to satisfy users. Ubiquitous learning as one application of ubiquitous computing is playing a very important role in our daily life. Training is a kind of learning in ubiquitous environment. During the whole training process, the performance of a learner in a series of units may change with patterns: progress, plateau, and decline. Therefore, it is necessary to apply different support strategies to adapt to different states of the learner. In the previous work, a mutual adaptive support based on one learner model was proposed. However one learner model may sometime make the learner lose his/her motivation easily, since each learner does the training independently. There is a need to propose support for group training which is used to let learners do training and improve themselves together. But in the current models for group training, most of them focus on cooperative and competitive training but ignore balance feeling of connection and burden of learners. Feeling of connection is very important in group training since it can give learners continuing motivation by exchanging information. However it also may bring burden to learners due to frequency, volume and content of exchanged information. So an effective mechanism is needed to balance the feeling of burden and connection of multiple learners. To this end, we propose a new support method for a pair of learners to solve the problem. In this paper, firstly, we calculate how much a learner affects the other learner. Then we design an algorithm to judge the feeling of connection and burden from the other leaner. Finally, due to different feeling of connection and burden, various support strategies are designed to support learners. We have implemented our support method in a typing game and shown the method can balance the feeling of connection and burden.