Artificial intelligence as a support technique for
university learning
William Villegas-Ch Xavier Palacios-Pacheco
Facultad de Ingenierías y Ciencias Departamento de sistemas,
Aplicadas, Universidad Internacional del Ecuador,
Universidad de Las Américas, Quito, Ecuador
Quito, Ecuador xpalacio@uide.edu.ec
william.villegas@udla.edu.ec
Abstract— Currently, universities seek to improve
academic methods that come from a traditional model.
Traditional models base learning on the experience of teachers
and the development of activities. Studies carried out in the
educational field consider that not all activities generate
knowledge in students. The activities must adapt to the needs
of each student to build an efficient model that contributes to
learning. To solve this problem, education experts support
academic management in the use of information and
communication technologies. The inclusion of techniques such
as the analysis of educational data and artificial intelligence
identify the deficiencies and needs of students. This work
proposes the design of an expert system that interacts with
students and evaluates their responses with those of data
analysis systems to reach a conclusion and recommend
activities that align with the needs of each student.
Keywords— artificial intelligence, expert systems, active
learning, intelligent systems
I. INTRODUCTION
The contributions of information and communication
technologies (ICT) enrich the educational work. The
development of ICT demands a change in traditional learning
environments. The use of software and computerized
educational materials as a resource to support teaching and
learning processes has become a necessity. In addition, they
constitute a response to the problem that revolves around the
cognitive understanding of concepts and notions in
classrooms [1]. Previous works analyze the advances that
help to learn by integrating new technological concepts in
education. A large percentage of research focuses especially
on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in educational
processes. The inclusion of computer systems in universities
is increasingly necessary due to its flexibility and scalability
in educational management. An advantage of using ICT is
the analysis of this data. This process allows detecting the
academic problems that each student presents. Once the
problems are identified, methods and models can be
generated to improve learning.
Several techniques allow the student to reflect on what
they have learned. These techniques can be adapted to satisfy
diverse needs, everything depends on the tasks or activities
proposed to the student [2]. On the revealed ideas, it can be
considered that AI systems such as the expert systems (ES),
created for pedagogical and instructional purposes can
diagnose, debug and correct the development of student
learning. In addition, the system determines the cognitive
level of the student and helps him improve his weaknesses to
reach a higher level of learning. This work proposes the
development of an ES that represents a response-oriented to
the efficient decision making on teaching models and
didactic activities.
978-1-7281-1666-2/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE
Sergio Luján-Mora
Department of Software and
Computing Systems,
Alicante, Spain
sergio.lujan@ua.es
The proposed ES captures the knowledge of experts on
different topics, as well as experts in education. This
functionality allows us to recommend suitable strategies that
facilitate the scope and objectives proposed for a specific
university population [3]. The ES is able to interact with each
student and integrate into various computer systems to
extract information to reach a conclusion. Students develop
different activities in learning management systems (LMS)
based on the resources provided by each teacher [4].
The information that the ES obtains from the LMS added
to the information obtained from the interaction with the
student allows him to recommend specific activities to each
student. Reaching this level of learning management
guarantees effectiveness and can even nullify other problems
linked to student performance such as desertion. The paper is
divided as follows: Section II contains the theoretical
foundations that contribute to the design and implementation
of the proposed system. Section III contains the method in
which the entire development is systematically explained.
Finally section IV contains the conclusions obtained.
II. THEORETICAL FOUNDATION
A. Expert systems
ES use artificial intelligence techniques to respond
automatically to questions raised as if they were human
experts. These systems are applied in many fields of
knowledge due to their own nature and that are increasingly
being perfected. In the educational field, they play a leading
role due to the trends related to personalized education
through technological means [5].
B. Active learning
Active learning involves the use of a set of more effective
and interesting experimental methods. With active learning,
students assume greater responsibility for their own
education. It is characterized by very well structured and
challenging activities, with enough flexibility to adapt them
to the characteristics of the learning group and even at the
individual level. The activities are organized so that the
students develop them in face-to-face and virtual spaces or
the combination of them [6].
III. METHOD
The process begins with the identification of the problem
that lies in the fact that not all students learn in the same way.
There are several types of activities that are tailored to the
needs of each student, thus personalizing education. This
educational method is known as active learning. The
objective is to identify the needs of each student and
recommend a type of activity that meets these needs [7]. The
identification of needs, as well as the recommendation of
activities, it is possible to do it manually through human
experts. This method has many disadvantages ranging from a
biased identification under expert criteria, as well as high
error rates generated by the human component.
To improve the recommendation of manual activities,
ICTs integrate systems capable of analyzing the parameters
that define how each student learns and, based on these, the
system recommends activities automatically. Having a
system that interacts autonomously without having a human
expert among students relieves the attitude of the student and
this feels more confident when giving an answer. The
generation of an environment without pressures allows the
answers provided to the system to be more reliable and
unambiguous. However, this does not alleviate the process of
the need to verify and detect if the answers are true.
The participating university in the study has a data
analysis platform integrated into a business intelligence
system. The result of the data analysis allows identifying and
classifying the students that present similar patterns. This is
an ideal starting point for the execution of an ES since these
data will be one of the inputs of the system. Another entry is
the interaction with students; these data ensure that the
conclusions of the ES are effective when recommending
each activity.
A. Analysis of learning activities
To analyze the learning activities that the ES will
recommend to the students, it is necessary to define the roles
of each actor [8]. The first actor, are students who in a
traditional study program are a passive part of learning.
Passive learning is considered to be students who depend on
a second actor to acquire knowledge. This knowledge is
evaluated through different activities that demonstrate
mastery of a topic. The second actor is the teacher who,
based on his experience and knowledge, imparts a specific
subject to the students.
Once the actors are defined, it is important to identify the
factors that influence the learning process. The identification
of factors allows us to discover the physiological and
psychological states that favor the acquisition of knowledge
and skills in students. These factors influence the pace,
progress, efficiency, and accuracy that determine the kind
and quantity of learning improvement. In addition to these
factors, they also analyze hereditary factors that appear as
congenital problems that prevent the student from
developing their abilities to the fullest. Factors that refers to
the environment and the elements that surround the student.
Currently, it is common to meet students who are parents or
mothers of families that means that they work all day. In
these cases, the important thing is the quality of interaction
time and resolution of activities. Considering the
participation of each actor in learning, the next step is to
analyze the activities that contribute to knowledge. The
activities involved in this study have been analyzed in
previous works [9][10] that identify the method they use to
improve learning, the recommended activities are:
• A minute of paper is a highly effective technique to
control the progress of the student, both in the
understanding of the subject and the reaction with
the course material. They are applied after reading a
resource within the Moodle activities.
• Muddiest, it is a variation of a minute of paper; it is
possible to give students a longer period to answer
the question, at the end of a class period, or in a
natural break in the presentation.
• Reading Contest is a way to motivate students to
read the assigned material. Active learning depends
on students reviewing the resources available in each
module of the LMS. The reading test is an effective
measure of students' understanding so that the level
of sophistication as readers is measurable.
• Puzzles / Paradoxes is one of the most useful means
of eliciting insights to students about a topic. A
puzzle or paradox related to the concept in question
is presented, and the student is guided towards a
solution. By forcing students to work without
authority, the probability that they can critically
evaluate the presented theories increases.
• Discussion students are asked to pair up and answer
a question. This can be easily combined with other
techniques such as Questions and Answers.
• Conceptual Maps is a way to illustrate the
connections that exist between the terms or concepts
covered in the course material, students construct
conceptual maps by connecting individual terms by
lines that indicate the relationship between each set
of terms connected.
• Panel discussion round tables are especially useful
when students are asked to give class presentations
or reports as a way to include the entire class in the
presentation.
• Serious games that well-conceived can convey the
idea more easily.
By moving from a traditional education, to a learning
methodology that adjusts to the needs of each student, their
participation and continuous reflection is promoted. The use
of activities focused on learning promotes dialogue,
collaboration, development and construction of knowledge,
as well as skills and attitudes. The activities must be
motivating and challenging, capable of promoting an active
adaptation to solving problems.
B. Execution of the expert system
The ES interacts directly with the student. The
communication protocol is through questions and answers
that allow the ES to solve problems quickly and much faster
than a human expert. The ES bases its conclusions on a
deterministic methodology that aligns with the needs
outlined above [11]. For the development of ES the stages
proposed by Weiss and Kulikowski [12] are considered, each
phase must be properly analyzed and developed since this
directly influences the resulting quality of the ES; figure 1
shows the stages in the design of the ES.

Fig. 1. Stages in the design of the ES.
C. Identification of the problem
To identify the problem, the analysis of the student
environment is made. For this, general knowledge about the
university, its components, characteristics, structures, and
processes are extracted. The analysis of these parameters
contributes to the design of the ES allowing a global view of
the current state of the applied learning model. The ES
analyzes the economic and psychosocial factors of the
students and issues conclusions to recommend activities to
each student. Common learning problems are based on facts
and rules of a domain. Next, the problems identified in this
investigation are listed according to the learning experts:
• Learning problems (Very High)
• The needs of the student to offer solutions through
personalized activities are not evaluated (Very high)
• Lack of feedback from the student (High)
• Disappointment in the target audience (Media)
• Ignorance of the method used by teachers (Media)
• Acceptance of the educational model is low
(Medium)
• There is no desire to learn in the student (Low)
• The learning mechanism is not the most appropriate
(Low)
D. Find human experts
In this phase, we work with expert teachers in different
areas, the objective is to establish the questions that the
system should ask the students and that serve as a guide to
obtain a precise conclusion. The design of activities is
another task that this group of teachers must perform
focusing on the improvement of learning.
Another working group is composed of experts in
educational psychology who seek methods through which
the student is interested in generating knowledge and not
only in obtaining a grade. A third group is made up of
experts in the use of LMS. The objective of this group of
experts is to create the activities proposed by the experts in
the themes and translate them into the platform, considering
the methodologies proposed by the second group of experts.
1) Expert system design
The design must be flexible and gather characteristics
similar to human behavior. This includes the ability to
acquire knowledge, the reliability that allows trusting the
results, the knowledge domain that provides solidity in a
process and the ability to solve problems. The design is
based on a Bayesian theorem, which is an algorithm based
on probabilistic theory and combines the Bayes theorem with
the expressivity of the directed graphs [13]. The directed
graphs allow representing a causal model by means of the
graphic representation of the dependencies between the
random variables and the causal influences [14]. The design
is constituted by the Bayes theorem where given two
variables X and Y, such that P (x)> 0 for all x and P (y)> 0
for all Y is fulfilled:
It is used to know the a posteriori probability of a certain
variable of interest given a set of findings.
• Finding: determining the value of a variable, based
on a data (an observation, a measurement).
• Evidence: set of all the available findings at a given
moment.
• A priori probability: the probability of a variable or
subset of variables when there is no finding. It
coincides with the marginal probability P (x).
• Probability a posteriori: the probability of a variable
or subset of variables given the evidence “e”. It is the
conditional probability P (x | e).
The design of the ES based on Bayesian networks
constructs a decision tree that allows combining the
judgment of the experts with the available data and making
the inference between any set of variables [15]. The
architecture of an ES is organized according to three main
elements that are; knowledge base, inference engine, and fact
base. To ensure the dialogue between the machine and the
human, additional components are required. The components
that act additionally are the human component, knowledge
acquisition systems, etc.
E. Acquisition of knowledge
In this phase, the information of the subject is supplied
and the knowledge engineers transfer this knowledge to a
language that the ES understands. This stage requires great
dedication and maximum effort due to the different
languages spoken by the different parties and the different
experiences they have [16]. For the development of the ES,
the technical knowledge of experts in the area of computer
tools, networks, computer audit, robotics, etc. is used. These
areas of expertise are considered when contributing to
engineering careers related to ICT. On the other hand, there
are the experts in teaching who are in charge of crystallizing
the activities given by experts with a psychological tinge that
contributes to the active learning of the students. Once the
experts are selected and they agree to give their knowledge,
they start playing the role of the “knowledge engineer”, who
is in charge of extracting the knowledge from the expert and
giving it an appropriate representation, either in the form of
rules or in another type of representation, thus forming the
knowledge base of the ES.
F. Knowledge base
In this phase, the specialists provide knowledge engineers
with an orderly and structured knowledge base, and a set of
well-defined and explained relationships. This structured
way of thinking requires that human experts rethink,
reorganize, and restructure the knowledge base. As a result,
the specialist becomes a better connoisseur of his own
specialty field [17]. Is must differentiate between knowledge
and data, knowledge refers to statements of general validity,
such as rules, probability distributions, etc. The data refers to
the information related to a particular application. For
example, in the recommendation of a certain activity, the
learning problems, the methods and the relationships
between them, are part of the knowledge, while the specific
problems of a student are part of the data. The knowledge is
stored in the knowledge base and the data is stored in the
working memory.
Forms of representation of knowledge:
• Production rules
• Semantic networks
• Frames
The most used form of representation is by production
rules or also calls rules of inferences [38]. Most ESs are
based on this type of representation, for this reason, the
design for this work considers this option due to their success
stories, as well as the amount of existing information that
contributes to the development.
The rules of production are of the type:
• YES, Premise THEN Conclusion (YES TO THEN
B).
• Where both the premises and the conclusion, are not
more than a chain of events connected by “Y” or “O”,
in general, would be:
• IF Done1 AND / OR Done2 AND / OR ... DoneN
THEN Done1 AND / OR ... DoneN
The facts are statements that serve to represent concepts,
data, objects, etc. The set of facts that describe the problem is
the basis of facts.
G. The inference engine
It is the supervisor and is responsible for extracting the
conclusions based on the symbolic data applying the rules
that govern the system in which he works a change in the
rules results in different conclusions. The inference engine is
composed of three elements:
• Interpreter of rules or inference mechanism
• Reasoning mechanism that determines which rules of
the knowledge base can be applied to solve the
problem.
• Control strategy or conflict resolution strategy
The function of the inference engine is to execute actions
to solve the problem from an initial set of facts and
eventually through an interaction with the user. The
execution can lead to the deduction of new facts.
The rules of inference are; Yes (conditions, antecedents,
premises); Then (actions, consequences, conclusions).
The rules model the general knowledge of the domain
and constitute the knowledge base, the long-term memory
and the implications. For example, if x is 45 years old and
studies “then” x is a university student.
The design is based on providing the system with the
ability to ask several questions that have been developed
with the help of human experts. The ES will process all the
information through the aforementioned stages and reach a
conclusion. The percentage in the uncertainty with which the
ES reaches a conclusion will depend on the allocation of
activities.
The questions that the ES makes to the students are
designed in natural language and look for the interaction in a
simple and direct way. Below are several questions used to
interact with the student, these questions seek to know if the
student is giving a true answer [18]. For example, “are you in
the computer tools course?” this answer the ES knows in
advance since being integrated to the LMS knows the data of
the student, as well as the subject that is studying. This
integration also benefits the system since it also knows the
time of use of the platform and the qualifications of the
students in each activity. These parameters allow handling a
greater volume of facts that the system uses to reach a
conclusion.
• Hello, “X” how old are you?
• Are you in the computer course?
• Is the time you dedicate to the course enough?
• Do you have access to computer tools?
• Is your use of computer tools good?
• Are the contents of the course easy to understand?
• Do you think that reading the contents reduces the
time you would devote to the development of
activities?
• Do practical activities strengthen your learning?
• Have you done your activities with the use of videos?
• Do you want to develop a case applied to business
reality?
• Does following an instruction manual to the letter
help improve your dexterity in the development of
activities?
The answers are given by five options that are: Yes, I
think so, I do not know, I do not think so, No
H. Recommendation of activities
The process of recommendation of activities is based on
three stages where; a) the profile of the user is loaded
directly from the data that the ES finds in the LMS however
as questions of courtesy the student's name and age are
asked; b) it extracts information from the available activities
and that adjusts to the needs of each student; c) initiates the
recommender with the ES to compare the user's information
with the information stored in the knowledge base and
recommends an activity.
To understand the process carried out by the ES to
recommend one or several activities, Table I is presented,
where the weights are established through which the system
can perform the calculations to reach a certain conclusion.
This process is a basic example of the internal functioning of
the ES where five unique values of probability are handled,
which are: 1 = yes, 0.75 = I think so, 0.50 = I do not know,
0.25 = I do not think so, 0 = no.
TABLE I. ACTIVITY RECOMMENDATION PROCESS
Rapid tests
However, these tools need to follow processes that contribute
both to the student and to the teachers. For this reason, the
implementation of intelligent systems is an option that allows
students to interact directly with the system.
Intelligent systems by emulating human thought
processes serve as an extension of creativity and problem-
solving abilities. In the selected context can be restricted to
the design of learning environments and in particular, to the
definition of what will be the most effective activities to
embed in this design. The activities are designed to facilitate
that the students reach the objectives specified in the
curriculum design.
The problem that is presented to the designers of
educational environments is the number of variables that
interact with each other and to be included for a design that
includes active learning. The proposed system assists
designers and tutors in the identification of the best activities
given the scenario defined by the characteristics of the
learner and the context of learning. The ES identifies the best
instructional strategies, receiving as inputs the largest
amount of data from the educational scenario. With the
included data, the ES identifies the pattern or combination of

Developm

patterns that best adapts to the situation presented by the

Reading

Playful
control

Have user, recommending in this way the activities to be used by

Puzzle
games

ent of
cases

the designer.
The validity of the results obtained allows highlighting
the role of the experts who contributed with their knowledge
Little time of 0 1 0.75 0 0 to deduce the relevant variables of each subject and its
development of importance in learning. With this contribution, it is possible
activities to carry out a multicriteria classification for the
recommendation of activities in a timely and efficient
Solving
manner. The result of the use of the ES allows us to
problems 0 0 0.75 1 1 recommend a variety of activities that contribute to active
improves your learning, using the multicriteria concept; it presents the result
learning of the optimal parameters of each activity based on the
Discussion on behavior of the students.
0 0 0 0.5 0
specific topics
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