Many intelligent tutoring systems have been developed and used to support students' learning. Good 
online learning systems require emotional communications happened in-between the tutors and the 
learners. Emotions play an important role when users engage in career or drama training, or 
language learning situations via role-play. Interpreting player experience and affect from 
open-ended verbal communication and diverse body language has been challenging research tasks. 
Such research is significantly beneficial to the development of intelligent virtual agents which 
are capable of interpreting social relationships, context, general mood and emotion, sensing or 
reasonably predicating others' inter-conversion, identifying its role and participating 
intelligently in open-ended interaction. How to develop a system which can identify user's emotion 
and/or present its feelings to the user according to user's words, behaviors, and performance in 
online learning is definitely an important, a very helpful as well an interesting research topic.

The purpose of this special issue is to explore how models, theories, and solutions of emotion 
intelligence can be used in online learning and what benefits users can receive from such emotion 
intelligence-embedded systems and agents.

Guest Editors (in alphabet order): Dr. Maiga Chang, Dr. Rita Kuo and Dr. Li Zhang
Suggested topics:
We cordially invite authors to submit high quality manuscripts for any application domain as long 
as the core of the manuscript belongs to:

 Affect sensing from text, speech, facial expression and gestures

 Affect inspired interactive intelligent games (e.g., mobile interfaces, augmented reality 
platforms, natural user interfaces - non touch based user interfaces)

 Emotion modelling and generation

 Human computer interaction issues and challenges that affective computing/emotional intelligence 
solutions for online learning may have

 Emotional tutoring agents/learning companions/interactive robots

 Affective computing tools, systems and applications for online learning

 Emotional intelligent agents for assisting teaching or learning

 Multi-agent based affective computing systems and applications

 Practical experiences in using & deploying emotional intelligence for online learning

 Successful cases of applying emotional intelligence to online learning

 Not-so-successful cases and the lessons learnt

 Evaluation models for emotional intelligent agents/systems

Important dates and manuscript guidelines:
All submissions have to follow IGI Global journal manuscript guidelines and should be sent to the 
guest editors directly via email (maiga.chang@gmail.com, rita.mcsl@gmail.com and L.Zhang@cs.bham.ac.uk). 
by February 28, 2012. All submissions are going to be reviewed by at least three reviewers, the 
final camera-ready manuscripts have to be revised by the author(s) according to reviewer comments 
before sending to the guest editors by June 1, 2012. The other important dates are:

February 28, 2012: Submission deadline
May 1, 2012: Review result notification
June 1, 2012: Revised manuscript submission deadline
June 15, 2012: Acceptance notification
June 30, 2012: Final camera-ready manuscript submission deadline
IGI Global manuscript guidelines at:
http://www.igi-global.com/Files/AuthorEditor/journaltemplate.doc
For queries, please contact Dr. Maiga Chang (maiga.chang@gmail.com)