Cooperative Agents in Web-Based Distance Learning

In the last few years, we have observed an explosive growth of multimedia computing, communications, and applications. This revolution is transforming the way people live, work, and interact with each other, and is impacting the way businesses, education, entertainment, and health care are operating. Due to the opportunities provided by the Internet, more and more people are taking advantage of distance learning courses. During the last few years, enormous research efforts have been dedicated to the development of distance learning systems (Katayama & Kambayashi, 1999; Nakabayashi et al., 1997). Consequently, many large projects such as the CALAT Project (www.calat.com), CAL surf (http://webbase.ntts.co.jp),, WebCAI (http:// iclap.ce.nihon-u.ac.jp/~webcam_), The University of The Air (http://www.u-air.ac.jp/, and WIDE University (http://www.sfc.wide.ad.jp/soi/contents.html) have been established (Ogawa, Ijiun, & Murai, 1999).