The purpose of this workshop is to explore the issues concerned with the design of effective help provision within Interactive learning Environments.
Learners can often recognise the solution to a problem, but cannot reproduce this solution without assistance from a more able partner/s. This requires more than the provision of context sensitive help; it requires learner sensitive help too. Effective teachers can adjust to individual learners or groups of learners and amend the challenge of a task and the amount of support they provide. Software scaffolding techniques have provided one way of implementing flexible assistance for students using interactive learning environments.
The question of effective help provision is not just about the content of the help that a system provides: it is also about how that help is made available to learners. There is much emphasis within education upon learners' metacognitive skill development that brings with it a need for system designers to explore how learners seek and use the help provided.
Papers are sought on various questions associated with the above issues. These questions include, but are not restricted to the following:
