Camits: a Cooperative Agents Model for Intelligent Tutoring Systems.
R. J. Imbert · 1998
One of the main difficulties that the education currently must face is the growing demand, which implies the loss of the personal instruction concept. One alternative to try to return to this kind of instruction has been the application of Artificial Intelligence techniques to the Computer Based Instruction, which has lead to Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) [4]. However, it is obvious that these systems have not been fully consolidated as a serious alternative for instruction, mainly owed to: • The ability for student adaptation of traditional ITS is very Besides, the use of these agents in MAS provides a lot of advantages: scalability, fault tolerance, easiness for distribution, easiness for optimising, technology independence. With all these characteristics, a cooperative agents system seems a good modelling approach to provide the necessary system adaptation to the students and to the subjects, to facilitate the autonomy of the components, and its independence from the knowledge field that it is taught. 3 THE NEW MODEL DEFINITION 3.1 Study of the usual instructional processes limited; it is rather the student who must adapt to the system. To begin with, a very detailed study of the usual instructional • Traditional ITS structure is still too monolithic, what processes has been carried out. This task has resulted in a hampers their dynamic improvement and their components hierarchical identification of the procedures that a teaching process reuse. consists of. With this aim, a generic and complete instructional • Traditional ITS internal structure is determined by the process has been considered, not only thinking of an Intelligent knowledge taught by the system. Tutoring System, but any teaching process, including a non-There is a need to find a model to solve these obstacles, in order computer-mediated one. to reach efficient, easily maintainable ITS. The first level of this hierarchy is a set of five task blocks, under which every process of the model is classified. These generic 2 A NEW APPROACH FOR ITS MODELLING blocks are administration tasks, teaching tasks, assistance tasks, The research line here described consists of the modelling of an study tasks and evaluation tasks. ITS using a cooperative agents system, that is, a Multiagent System • The administration tasks include the functions for collecting