An authoring system for ITS which is based on a generic level of tutoring strategies

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a research which took place at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis during the last four years and is now continued at the University of La Reunion. It particularly describes the architecture of an authoring system, EDDI, which aims at providing a basis for the development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). The system is not general to any domain to teach, but is more adapted to domains in which knowledge is structured and domains which require a well-known expertise, such as diagnosis.

The architecture of EDDI is object-oriented and is based on the description of a generic level which contains the tutoring strategies. The domain to teach is represented by a set of objects and relationships which form a semantic network.

The originality of the approach is to describe the generic level by looking at the structure of the objects and relationships of the domain to teach which are inspected during the tutoring session rather than the domain itself. For that, the tutoring strategies are classified according to three fundamental categories (strategies for guiding a session, decision strategies and application strategies). The whole architecture is described, a sample example of a tutoring session and some details about the implementation of EDDI are also presented.