VIRTUAL LEARNING SYSTEM Goran Kimovski Vladimir Trajkovic Danco Davcev Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University “Sv. Kiril i Metodij”, Skopje, Macedonia gkimovski@intersoft.com.mk; {trvlado; etfdav}@cerera.etf.ukim.edu.mk ABSTRACT In this study, a Virtual Learning System that integrates Virtual Classroom and Virtual Laboratory services is presented. The Virtual Classroom represents an interface between the students and a virtual professor and provides personalized learning materials to the users. The Virtual Laboratory offers a possibility to the attendees to share different resources at once and work with them as if they were at the same place where (real) resources are. In the system design, we use agents as entities that work on different tasks in the system. A set of agents of the same type is responsible for handling different users and their requests. The cooperation among agents is established through the act of exchanging messages. Virtual Learning System is implemented in Windows 9x/NT environment using Java for the agents implementation. Keywords: web system, object-oriented design, distance education systems, agents, mobile agents, Java, DCOM, XML Technical area: Distance Learning Technologies 1. INTRODUCTION In this study, a Virtual Learning System that integrates Virtual Classroom (VC) and Virtual Laboratory (VL) services is presented. The VC service represents the interface between the students and a virtual professor and provides personalized learning materials to the users. Personalized learning materials can be created only if the system adapts to the student needs shown in the student’s interaction process. That process is supported with the help of several mobile agents with different speciality, such as an agent responsible for student classification and a set of agents responsible for supporting learning activities such as finding the learning material relevant to student’s needs. We consider VC only as a part of Virtual University. Thus, we try to develop a distributed architecture that can be reused for any course that can be activated in the Virtual University. The VL offers a possibility to the attendees to share different resources at once and work with them as if they were at the same place where (real) resources are. One scenario can be to control remotely a robot system in a chemical laboratory from a PC connected on Internet. The idea of the resource is not limited to some specific laboratory equipment. As with VC, we use agents in