ALAN: a multimedia intelligent tutoring system

摘要

In this paper, we describe the ALAN system which is a Hypercard-based, multimedia intelligent tutoring system, which assists students in understanding the distance learning event that took place at the ALAsakan North slope school district. The main idea behind the development of ALAN is to integrate the multimedia technologies with AI techniques to build more powerful and effective tutor. This is motivated by the observation that most traditional intelligent tutoring systems lack the richness of multimedia interactions such as interactive video/audio, whereas most works on multimedia application systems overlooked the issue of incorporating domain knowledge and AI techniques to make the system more flexible, adaptive and robust. One important feature of ALAN is that it uses multimedia presentation techniques such as digital video/audio, images, icons and graphics, etc., to convey the information to the students in the most natural way. Moreover, the multimedia presentation schems are well integrated with the knowledge representation methods which are semantic network-like structures. Simple student modeling and remedial instruction are also performed. The ALAN system has been implemented and its trial uses have given positive feedbacks.