Considering Intelligent Tutoring Systems as Mass Customization of Digital Education

Abstract

AbstractIn the digital era, individualized educational services, e.g. distributed by intelligent tutoring systems, are becoming increasingly popular and important for life-long learning but also during the COVID pandemic as many universities had to switch to distance learning immediately. Intelligent tutoring systems simulate behavior and expertise of physical teachers and support learners individually. In addition to closed questions, which can be modeled simply as if-then statements or decision trees, the use of artificial intelligence enables more and more the implementation of open questions and poorly structured problems, which is of particular importance for e.g. engineering education. In order to make the learning experience authentic, it is important to understand the learners as individuals and to confront them with learning content and in-depth knowledge tailored to their needs and skills. If, e.g., a formative assessment shows that a certain content has not yet been internalized, the tutoring system must detect this and react accordingly. Since this largely corresponds to mass customizing the teaching process, the following article frames digital education with focus on intelligent tutoring systems in context with mass customization. For cracking the code of mass customizing digital education, the three mass customization key competences solution space development, robust process design as well as choice navigation are taken as reference to set up digital educational content.KeywordsDigital educationeLearningIntelligent tutoring systemsMass customization