Towards Teachers Quickly Creating Tutoring Systems
Michael A. Macasek · Digital WPI · 2005
Intelligent Tutoring Systems have historically been shown [5, 6] to be an effective means of educating an audience. While there is great benefit from such systems they are generally very costly to build and maintain. Currently it is estimated that 200 hours of time is required to produce one hour of Intelligent Tutoring Systems content [7, 8]. The Office of Navel Research is funding this work because they want to reduce the cost of construction for Intelligent Tutoring Systems. In order for Intelligent Tutoring Systems to be widely accepted and used in the classroom environment there needs to be a tool set that allows for even the most novice user to maintain and grow the system with minimal cost. The goal of this thesis is to create such a tool set targeted towards the Assistments Project [1]. One of the main goals of the Assistments Project is to provide a means for teachers to receive meaningful data from the system that they can take back to the classroom environment thus enabling a comprehensive learning solution. This tool set will be pivotal in the success of that goal as it is the primary means for teacher to interact with the system and receive such data. The effectiveness of the tool set will be examined by its ability to reduce the overall time it takes to package and distribute content on an Intelligent Tutoring System. 1.0