A Reinforcement Learning-Based Smart Educational Environment for Higher Education

Introduction

In a smart education environment (SEE) (Abdel‐Basset et al., 2019), digital learning provides enormous instructional practice to students to improve their learning ability. Smart learning uses various educational technologies such as flipped learning, blended learning, personalized learning and adaptive learning strategies (Cheung et al., 2021) to manage teaching quality. These learning technologies depend on digital tools that are varied according to the degree of learning. The digital learning concept (Confrey et al., 2018) is a little complex, enhancing the overall learning experience. In addition to this, the smart learning process saves instructor time and provides a better relationship between the teacher and student, ensures transparency and is easy to track student learning progress (Felten et al., 2019). Therefore, most instructors give positive feedback for digital learning in a smart education environment. The smart learning process has several challenges(Rapanta et al., 2021), such as too many digital tools for teaching/learning, requiring new instructional approaches, lack of time, accessing technologies at home, lack of digitized curriculum, lack of parent involvement, and collaboration with educators etc.

These problems are overcome by integrating digital learning in the classroom (Zainuddin, 2018), achieved via the flipped classroom, gamification and formative assessment. In the flipped classroom (Cevikbas et al., 2020), the learning is changed with the help of technology. The interactive environment (Liu et al., 2019) is created using the software and Wi-Fi connection. The teachers gather the student's responses according to the requirement at any time. Google software suite, seesaw, etc., are examples of the flipped classroom (Brueggeman et al., 2020). The next concept is gamification (Alt et al., 2020) which helps to boost creativity, social skills, teamwork, problem-solving skills and cooperation. The game-based classroom environment uses game-design thinking that feels classroom different and buzzing (Papadakis et al., 2019). Here, rewards are given to the winner, which boosts the student's learning ability and gives positive thoughts while facing the challenges. Classcraft, classdojo, play brighter are a few examples of gamification (Chusavitina et al., 2020). The last digital learning classroom is formative assessment (Barana et al., 2021). The classroom uses a checklist, questionnaires, and quizzes to analyze students' mindsets, thoughts, and ideas. The gathered information is more powerful in identifying the teachers/learners in the next direction (Hasan et al., 2021). In addition to this, the digital learning process minimizes the teacher's time for making the test-taking and online assignments. The teachers can create productive tasks and less plan with minimum effort and maximize the overall teaching efficiency. It is important to note that learning in digital environments is characterised by the availability of learning resources that can be accessed at any time, regardless of region. In addition, digital learning environments offer digitally altered teaching and promote educational possibilities for all groups of learners.