Using an Interactive Approach to Finding Right Tutors on P2P Tutoring Grids

Abstract

The e-Tutors Project supported by MoE, Taiwan, provides remote tutoring service for pupils of rural areas. The preliminary result shows that the learning performance of students has been improved. However, for this service to further assist rural students, the goal of adaptive learning has to be considered in tutor assignment process. Hence, a P2P Tutoring Grid is proposed for the sharing of voluntary tutor resources. In this work, we formulate the tutor finding problem and propose an interactive and iterative heuristic method. The proposed approach consists of two phases: construction phase and search phase. In construction phase, peer information is acquired and managed in a decentralized manner. In search phase, the intention of a query is verified interactively and iteratively to find right tutors. A prototype system has been developed and experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of this approach. The experimental results show that the interactive algorithm performs well in peer-to-peer networks with low trust and availability. Also, a survey of satisfaction shows that the proposed method is more user-friendly.