A Conceptual Framework for Internet based Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Ashok Patel · 1997
The Internet provides an infrastructure that supports unprecedented communication capabilities and collaboration opportunities. In the field of education, it supports collaboration between various domain experts and teachers in designing novel approaches to teaching and co-operation among teachers who can share instructional material. It offers a vast store of information that can be accessed in a structured manner or explored in an unstructured manner, providing opportunities for designing tutoring systems with diverse pedagogic strategies. The freedom and flexibility offered by the Internet can, however, turn into an extensive waste of time, effort and resources, if the nature of educational processes and the capabilities of educational technologies are not adequately considered while designing a tutoring system. The development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) has suffered since its early days from the fact that the underlying software engineering methodology was not developed specifically for tutoring and did not possess all the desired attributes to facilitate intelligent tutoring. While an ITS inherits powerful functionality at the points of convergence between its objectives and the capabilities of the methodology employed, it also inherits a ‘context gap ’ at the points of divergence between the purpose of the tasks performed within an ITS and the purpose of the methodology. The traditional ITS development was