An authoring tool for procedural-task training
David A. Guralnick · 1996
Despite recent technological advances, relatively little high-quality educational and training software is actually in use in the field, largely because of the size of the required software-development effort. One way to facilitate the production of more high-quality training software is to increase the number of people that can produce it via the development of authoring tools. In particular, one group to target includes teachers and trainers, who possess specific knowledge about particular domains but lack the skills necessary to design and build computer-based training systems around that knowledge. Rather than building general-purpose authoring tools, which fail to help an author structure his domain knowledge into a learning environment, the best way to create authoring systems that can produce quality educational and training software is to create a set of theory-rich tools, each specifically tailored for a particular task class. In this dissertation, I describe MOPed-II, a theory-rich authoring tool designed specifically for building procedural-task training systems (procedural tasks are defined as tasks in which there is a correct answer or set of answers; an example procedural task is that of ringing up customer orders on a special-purpose cash register). In order to build a course using MOPed-II, an author fills out a series of on-screen forms which describe the procedures trainees will have to perform and the tutoring guidance that will help them do so. The information an author enters includes such things as the order in which steps must be taken, explanations for why steps are correct or incorrect within the context of a particular task, and what happens on the trainee's screen after a step is taken. MOPed-II is made up of two primary components: a set of predefined task templates, which help an author organize his content information, and a set of tutoring strategies, which use the content information to provide appropriate guidance and feedback to a trainee using a MOPed-II training course. The task templates and tutoring strategies are domain-independent, and facilitate the construction of a variety of procedural-task training systems.