News Release

New tool enables to design courses for Intelligent Tutoring Systems simply and intuitively

Book Announcement

Elhuyar Fundazioa

HéctorEscudero-Jiménez, a Computer Engineer, has created a tool that enables courses for Intelligent Tutoring Systems to be designed simply and intuitively. This is the subject of his PhD thesis entitled Propuesta e implementación de unaarquitecturagenéricapara la creación de cursosparaSistemasTutores Inteligentes (Proposal and Implementation of a generic architecture for the creation of courses for Intelligent Tutoring Systems), which he has recently defended at the UPNA/NUP-Public University of Navarre.

The field of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) seeks to apply artificial intelligence techniques to the development of computer-aided learning systems for the purpose of building intelligent learning systems. An ITS approaches learning as a process of cooperation between the tutor and the student, where the former aims to teach a number of concepts which the student is required to learn.

In general, this process is guided by the tutor, who has to analyse the behaviour of the student not only to find out his/her knowledge status but also to meet his/her requirements and thus be able to determine and apply the right learning strategiesat each moment. These strategies need to resolve a series of priority questions like how to explain, with what degree of detail, when and how to interrupt the student, and how to detect and correct his/her errors.

In his research work,HéctorEscudero explains that the Intelligent Tutoring Systems we have seen so far are based on creating core rules capable of guiding the student's learning about a subject. "The problem they pose is that they lack an interface that allows a course to be created in a straightforward way," says the author, who highlights the fact that nowadays it is necessary to be an expert in ITSs to be able to create a course. "Above all, bearing in mind that these tools should be geared towards teachers and educators so that they can create courses tailored to their students," explains Escudero.

Authoring tool

The thesis does not create an Intelligent Tutoring System, but rather an authoring tool that allows courses to be created in a straightforward and intuitive way, as well as a methodological basis that can help to create more tools of this type in the future. The tool will create a course, which will be used by an ITS to guide the student's learning, so that two applications will be needed to set it up: the application that creates the course and the one that represents it.

An ITS consists of a series of general rules which it applies in order to be able to decide the learning methods, the sequences of learning modules, and other sequences that are specific to each course, like Basic Learning Units (BLUs) and the characteristics of the students who will be receiving the course. That way, it will only be necessary to specify the specific rules for each course by means of the authoring tool, while the general rules will be incorporated into the application for representing the course.

The fact that two different applications are needed means that information has to be transmitted from one to the other. So the authoring tool devisedby HéctorEscuderowill create an ontology in which the rules and required content will be codified so that the course can be represented. Ontologies provide a common vocabulary about a domain and define, with varying levels of formality, the meaning of the terms and how they relate to each other. In ontologies, knowledge is formalized by using five different components: classes, relationships, functions, axioms and instances.

The structure of the ontology changes depending on the ITS type, in other words, for each different ITS type a different structure has to be created, which means that the instances are also different.So, as mentioned above, a course can be seen as a set of concepts.These concepts may be of different types depending on their ITS configuration.In any case, each concept basically has a name, a set of attributes, some relationships with other concepts, and a content that defines each concept.

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