Integrating cognitive tools for peer help: The intelligent intranet peer help-desk project

This chapter outlines the design of the Intelligent Intranet Help-Desk, focusing on the peer help tools that act as its structural skeleton. The advantage of using an intranet instead of the Internet is that access is restricted to students attending the course; they can communicate only with their peers and teachers. Universities are experiencing large growths in student/teacher ratios and face the difficult problem of providing adequate help resources for their staff, faculty, and students. Created in the Computer Science Department at the University of Saskatchewan in 1996, the Cooperative Peer Response system sought to meet some of the urgent help needs of students in the department. One of the problems that students complained about was that their questions were sometimes unanswered. The time delay in obtaining a useful response was also a complaint. The key to generating a reasonable candidate list intelligently involves maintaining knowledge profiles for every potential helper.