Rapid Prototyping of an Intelligent Tutorial System

Today there are few Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) available that can teach outside a specialised domain. In the 90’s, the hardware limitations of speed, memory capacity and cost are reducing, but the software still needs to be streamlined. We need to build tools that enable rapid prototyping of tutoring systems over a range of domains. We argue that such systems can be built effectively from the combination of electronic books as the interface medium, driven by knowledge-based systems. Early generic systems were not effective teaching systems. We need to link the independent layers of the domain and the basic teaching strategies by providing a meta-strategy layer. Different teaching styles may be used both for different domain areas and for different students. Systems must allow flexibility in teaching styles as well as in domain material. This paper describes the process of rapid development of an intelligent tutoring system in ToolBook. It uses dynamic links to Word for Windows and Excel files to automate the electronic book creation for a given domain. The teaching strategies and student progress are also communicated as tables in Excel, enabling the tutor to teach intelligently according to the teacher’s prescribed paths. We have thus developed a generic framework into which the teacher supplied domain material and tutoring strategies can be linked. The prototype generates an ITS for tutoring loop structure in Pascal with various strategies. Our aim is to build a tool that can be used to generate tutoring systems with versatile teaching strategies over a range of hierarchically organised domains.