The Successive Contributions of Computers to Education: A Survey

Abstract

For several decades, computers have been used in educational settings. Our purpose here is to show how education has successively benefited from traditional information processing, through programmed instruction and computer-assisted instruction (CAI), then from artificial intelligence, through intelligent CAI and then intelligent tutoring systems, then from multimedia and hypermedia techniques, through intelligent learning environments, and finally how it can now benefit from the technologies of information and communication, in particular through the Internet. We finally give an outlook of the current trends of research.