Uses of Artificial Intelligence on Computer Based Instruction

I mainly want to discuss three extended examples of computer-based instruction at the university level on which I have worked for many years with my colleagues. I shall try to illustrate in some detail, how we have used, and also how we have been limited in our use, of artificial intelligence in constructing the courses. The three courses are Introduction to Logic, Axiomatic Set Theory, and our current project, Differential and Integral Calculus. Before turning to the details of these three courses, I want first to make some general remarks about artificial intelligence in higher education. A general distinction that I think is useful is between hard and soft artificial intelligence. Since these terms are not standard, let me explain what I mean. Hard artijîcid intelligence. By " hard " artificial intelligence I mean the kind of work in artificial intelligence that has back of it well developed formal theories, usually theories that have a considerable mathematical development. Examples important for education that I have in mind are: Natural language processing by computer, Smart parsers and grammatical diagnosis, Interactive theorem provers and symbolic computation systems, Digital speech production and recognition. There is another important feature of these examples relevant especially to their use in education. That is that they depend upon no deep or general theory of the mind. There is no developed psychology underlying their theoretical formulation, or following as a consequence of their theoretical elaboration. Soft artificial intelligence. As typical examples of soft artificial intelligence I would list the following: Mental models of students working problems, Psycholinguistic theories of human language processing, Theories of intelligent computer-assisted instruction, Construction of tutorials, Uses of expert problem solving. All of these examples represent important and significant topics but they are all unified in lacking back of them a developed and elaborate formal theory, in contrast to the examples of hard artificiá1 intelligence. This very lack of developed theory argues strongly that success in applying and developing these examples of soft artificial intelligence will necessarily move slower. It seems to me that this is supported by the current evidence. For exa*mple, formal and maihematical theories of grammar and parsing are now applied 207 extensively not only in the educational use but in the general use of computers. In contrast, the important psychological subject of human language processing, the focus of endless empirical investigations in the past thirty or forty years, is still …