Development of a Methodology and Software Shell for the Automatic Generation of Intelligent Tutoring Systems from Existing Generic Task-based Expert Systems

摘要

There is a growing demand for a wide array of principled and useful instructional software applications, in both academic and industrial settings. The need for effective tutoring and training is increasingly important in industry and engineering fields, which demand the learning of complex tasks with the use of large knowledge stores. In the last two decades, intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) were proven to be highly effective as learning aides (Shute and Psotka, 1996), and numerous ITS research and development efforts were initiated. However, few tutoring systems have made the transition to the commercial market thus far. The main reasons for this failure to deliver are that the development of ITSs is difficult, time-consuming, and costly (Murray, 1998). Thus, there is a need for easier, more cost-effective means of developing tutoring systems.