Stephen P. Versace, Associate Director, Executive Programs, University of Maryland University College (UMUC) is a UMUC faculty member who has taken a great interest in the potential uses of intelligent agents in education and learning. Aided by a research grant from the Institute of Research and Assessment in Higher Education (IRAHE), Versace and Sal Monaco, Executive Director of the MBA programs at UMUC, have examined how an intelligent agent called Sylvie might be implemented as a virtual teaching assistant in a Project Management seminar. Sylvie is the verbot featured in Steve Knode's presentation. Produced by Conversive, Inc., Sylvie is no longer available for purchase; however, an older version can still be downloaded from various sites, such as RocketDownload.com.

In an April 2001 interview, excerpted below, Versace comments on his collaboration with Steve Knode, who guided the research project, the use of Sylvie in the Executive Technology Management (XTMAN) program, and the vast potential of intelligent agents for higher education.

How did Steve Knode come to be involved in the research project?

I've known Steve Knode for almost eight years and, and as a matter of fact I managed a budget that pretty much set up his entire lab and gave him the freedom to really do some interesting stuff. Last year when IRAHE asked for research proposals I talked to Steve and I said, "You know, I'd really like to build something in project management." I had in mind a kind of 'tag-along tutor' that could guide students through different tasks and issues in project management. I thought the idea might have larger application, too. We can't copyright Sylvie, but if we could buy a run-time version, design it as an intelligent tutor for project management, and present it on a CD, it might be very marketable.

How are you using Sylvie in the XTMAN course sequence?

Partly we're created an audio/visual presentation, and partly we're assigning Sylvie as a tool for students to manage and manipulate. The audio/visual presentation...Working with Microsoft Project, we'll program Sylvie so that it walks and even talks through a number of different tasks. So that, for instance, if a student is working on a project and can't figure out how to assign precedence for instance, they can say to Sylvie, "I need to set a precedent. Can you walk me through how to do that?" And Sylvie will be programmed to activate a streaming video that explains exactly how to assign precedence in Microsoft Project and also shows the steps, one by one. That's only one task we're programming Sylvie with, but it shows you the kind of direction we're going in.

The other part...Sylvie as a tool...We've programmed a number of questions and answers into Sylvie and asked the students to manipulate Sylvie as much as they can and to give us feedback in terms of what questions, answers or information Sylvie ought to be able to provide. We figure we can only develop Sylvie as an effective tutor if it is serving the students' needs, so we're using their responses to generate Sylvie's information base.

We're also assigning Sylvie as a special project in the Doctorate in Management program. There is one doctoral student working with me, Donna McKalip, whose assignment is to use Sylvie to build a syllabus, evaluation tools, and instructional materials. We expect to produce a paper for IRAHE about this research, and in due course our hope would be to turn that into an article for publication..

What is the potential of this technology for online learning?

We don't know its limitations. It is growing by leaps and bounds and we are very excited about it. Its possibilities for information management are tremendous. Just to take an example: assuming we can develop or implement a robust version of a verbot we could create one for the UMUC Web site that would answer questions from students about courses or campuses. When they visit our Web site, they would have the option of activating the verbot and interacting with it. The verbot might say, "Hi what's your name?" When they enter their name, the verbot gives its own name, "Hi, I'm Ms. UMUC—UMUC, what kind of questions did you want to ask about the school?" And then it could lead on to other areas. The verbot might say, "Oh you're interested in computer science courses, okay, that would be in the IT department in the undergraduate program," and so on. The point is, you can program an intelligent agent so that it knows the answer to questions people ask most frequently, so you have a great way not only of maintaining that information but communicating it to whoever needs it. And you can customize the answers according to the need. The possibilities for this technology are endless!

About Stephen P. Versace

Dr.Versace received his Ph.D. from University of Maryland, College Park in 1978. He joined University of Maryland University College (UMUC) as Associate Director for Executive Programs in 1997, where he oversees development of the Executive Master's Program in Information Technology. Prior to coming to UMUC, he was a professor at the Information Resources Management College of National Defense University (NDU). Among many other achievements, he helped created the first fully electronic classroom at NDU. You can learn more about Dr. Versace at http://www.umuc.edu/grad/staff/bios/sversace.html.