A survey of components for intelligent tutoring pedagogical aspects of GET-BITS model

Abstract

The concept of software components has received relatively little attention so far by the researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED). This paper is an attempt to bring more light on this important concept and to describe the benefits that component-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) can bring to the field. Surprisingly enough, there is still no consensus on the notion of component among AIED researchers. There are many open questions and unclear issues. By carefully structuring the description of software components in general, as well as by showing some examples of components for ITSs design, the paper presents several important related issues, like functionality of components, their granularity, generality, interoperability, and reusability. Special attention is given to the architectural and communication considerations, as well as to the relation between components and ontology's for ITSs design. The paper describes pedagogical aspects and the control knowledge of the component based model of intelligent tutoring systems, called GET-BITS . The focus is on class hierarchies and design of classes for representing the pedagogical and the control knowledge in the GET-BITS model. Distinction has been made between different modes of operation of the pedagogical module in an intelligent tutoring system (teaching, examination, and consulting), resulting in the necessity for the class hierarchies to reflect specific pedagogical knowledge structure.