Introduction

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Over the last few years, universities and colleges have made substantial progress in using the Internet to deliver courses. This is referred to as “elearning” or digital learning. This trend blurs the differences between information technology applications in education and distance education. While taking courses, students on campuses often extensively acquire distributed learning resources, communicate, and collaborate with other teachers and learners anywhere and at any time. Therefore, campus-based education and distance education, to some extent, tend to be integrated. As well, distance training is frequently used in enterprise training. Distance education and training developed rapidly over the past several years. The research on distance education and distance training has become one of the hottest fields in educational technologies.

The Internet and Web-based distributed learning can potentially deliver personalized course materials and services, and therefore, are potentially able to accommodate a larger variety of learners than what can be accommodated currently.

A distributed learning environment can be implemented practically by using a set of Web services. These Web services offer a set of software artifacts and technologies that service providers or users can modularize and encapsulate with well-defined standard interfaces, host on their platforms of choice, manage and run either locally or remotely, transport over the Internet or any intranet by using standard protocols over and above TCP/IP, locate from central registries, and exhibit near plug-and-play characteristics with an environment (Geng et al., 2003).

The dynamic and distributed nature of both resources and applications in distributed learning environments requires that software does not merely respond to requests for information but intelligently adapts and actively seeks ways to support learners and educators. Agent technologies have become some of the primary weapons in the arsenal aimed at addressing the emergent problems and managing the complexity of such environments. The agent-based approach is suitable for supporting distributed learning, because relationships among learners, courses, and instructors last for a considerable period of time. Software agents can be implemented in a granular fashion, achieving results quickly. Intelligent software agents contain a level of intelligence.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how to facilitate the creation of dynamic, intelligent, and autonomous services to achieve adaptive distributed learning using intelligent software agents and agent-supported Web services.

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