ITS-Engineering: Providing Adaptive Teaching in the Engineering Tutor

摘要

The successful learning of an engineering student depends substantially on the instructor's ability to adapt instruction, both the content and the various teaching styles, to individual differences among students. The contents of the instruction should appropriately match the level of the student's knowledge; thus, they can efficiently acquire new information. Instruction should be presented to students in various styles depending on the learning/teaching situation (i.e., subject matter, level of student knowledge, learning outcome, interaction history of certan style, level of student control) at the moment.The emergence of computer applications in education and training, such as intelligent tutoring systems, provides a viable alternative to achieve these teaching tasks. The major benefits of the computerized instruction are several. First, the computer is never exhausted with a student if they request multiple repetition of instruction. Second, without the nature of human mistake, the computer always provides instruction that adapt to learning condition. Thus computerized instruction is a significant tool for the effective application of adaptive teaching.ITS-Engineering is a tutoring system shell intended to provide a developing framework for applications in the engineering domains with less time and cost. Based on Gagne's instructional design and the multiple teaching style paradigm, the application is able to deliver instruction that adapts in both content and teaching styles. The available teaching styles in ITS-Engineering include instructor-oriented, guided-discovery, user-initiated and exploratory styles. The instructor-oriented and the guided discovery style represents the teacher-control paradigm. In contrast, the user-initiated and the exploratory style represent the learner-control paradigm. The application of these teaching styles and their adapting capabilities are demonstrated in TTS-CPM (Intelligent Tutoring System for Construction and Project Management); an ITS application developed with in the framework of ITS-Engineering.