Designing a Tutoring Agent for Facilitating Collaborative Learning with Instant Messaging

In this study, we propose a tutoring agent that uses MSN Messenger, a popular synchronous internet media, as the communication platform. Students can invite the agent to a discussion session on MSN Messenger. The agent understands the students’ questions in natural language, and provides answers or hints during the group discussion. Unlike a traditional natural language tutoring agent that converses with one student at a time, our agent needs to work with a group of students in MSN chat.