Collaborative teaching in distance education - an innovation in intelligent tutoring

Abstract

In the current educational environment with the increasing demand on educational opportunities accompanied by increasingly constrained resources, alternative educational media such as distance education are becoming more attractive for academic institutions. The Internet facilitates co-operative teaching and learning, offering an exciting potential to share both the learning resources and the tasks of creating new learning resources. It accommodates far more interactions, involving richer information, between and among the student and teacher communities. This paper recognises this potential of the Internet and describes the Web based Hyper Intelligent Tutoring Systems (Hyper-ITS) to enable cooperative teaching and learning in numeric disciplines. The traditional approach to ITS development has under-played a teacher's role in the success of the computer based learning approach, seeking to eliminate the teacher from the learning process. The proposed system design acknowledges the central role played by the teacher in a dynamic system of education, seeking to harness the extended reach and cost-effective communications provided by the Internet to support a co-operative effort by various teachers in creating tutoring systems in a bottom-up fashion through incremental changes. The co-operation can extend beyond the system design tasks to creating ancillary learning resources based on a particular tutoring system e.g. narrative form questions and model answers used for assessment of student knowledge. (9 pages)