Authoring Knowledge-Based Tutors: Tools for Content, Instructional Strategy, Student Model, and Interface Design

Abstract

Although Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs), also called knowledge-based tutors, are becoming more common and proving to be increasingly effective, each one must still be built from scratch at a significant cost. At the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, we have developed domain independent tools for authoring all aspects of a knowledge-based tutor: the domain model, the teaching strategies, the student model, and the learning environment. In this article, I describe these tools, discuss a number of design issues and design tradeoffs that are involved in building ITS authoring tools, and discuss knowledge acquisition and representation issues encountered in my work. I also describe how we plan to use these tools (collectively called Eon), including ontology objects, as a meta-authoring tool for designing special-purpose authoring tools tailored for specific domain types.