To ensure economic success, constant training and further education is essential for executive employees in almost any type of industry today. The accelerated replacement and modification of methods, techniques and tools, particularly in the fields of information and bio-technology, call for permanent education. The decreasing number of young and skilled personnel in Germany demands perpetuation and enhancement of professional expertise of experienced employees through lifelong learning.
E-learning systems allow companies to offer cost-efficient self-directed training. However, existing tools don?t consider daily routines sufficiently and exhaust their possibilities in adapting to the trainees? qualifications before selecting appropriate teaching materials. Actual working contexts and current tasks are disregarded.
It is in this context that the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence aims to develop a pedagogical software agent which offers case-sensitive personalized training programs to prepare for actual problem-solving. The motivation is to provide those competences relevant for particular tasks. The tasks are described in abstract business process and workflow models which enable the teaching of inexperienced employees on respective procedures and sequences.
If a worker?s profile doesn?t meet the required skills the pedagogical agent suggests context-specific lessons out of a repository stored in a conventional learning content management system. The system then creates a micro-curriculum based on associated e-learning contents which considers the worker?s qualifications as well as his preferences regarding instruction-designs. In order to identify relevant teaching contents and to be able to dynamically adapt the system to actual developments, inquiries are documented.
The project is part of the competence center ?Virtual Office of the Future?, conducted by both the Fraunhofer-Institut für Experimentelles Software Engeneering (IESE) and the DFKI-GmbH Kaiserslautern. The TEAL prototype will be developed and tested in close cooperation with our partners in industry in order to facilitate practical innovative solutions and the perspective of an early implementation of marketable products.