Individualized course generation: a marriage between CAL and ICAL

Abstract An architecture of a “slightly-intelligent” Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) system is proposed, able to carry out a rather rigid, goal-driven, presentation-oriented style of teaching. However, it is able to generate individualized courses of instruction for students with differing background knowledge and with differing purposes. Already developed CAL courseware is used as a “raw material” for every individual course: thus the architecture builds upon an existing database of learning materials that will be used as a source of atomic course-pieces. The architecture includes domain-knowledge representation at three levels: a level of the teaching goals, a concept-level and a presentation level, containing the database of learning materials. An individualized course is generated dynamically out of the learning materials following the links in the concept-structure to meet the teaching goals assigned by the teacher. Individualization is obtained at three levels: in the teaching goals, in the selection of the concepts to be presented and in the selection of learning materials for a given concept. Three different types of student models are used for this purpose. We believe that this architecture is practical in cases when there is much available learning material and students with different backgrounds who need various and frequently changing teaching goals.