ABITS: learning more about students through intelligent educational software

Purpose – One of the greatest challenges facing any intelligent tutoring system is being able to adapt its behaviour based on the student's current knowledge level, ability, needs and wishes within a course. This paper aims to present a framework of BDI agents within an agent‐based intelligent tutoring system (ABITS).Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual discussion approach is taken.Findings – The agents provide the core reasoning ability. In particular, the paper demonstrates how the system sources and refines a particular set of commonly available data. Also shows how these data are incorporated into the agents' belief set so that they may adapt their behaviour to support individual students.Originality/value – Provides a framework that can improve learning procedures for future users of ABITS.