Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors

Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors discusses educational systems that assess a student's knowledge and are adaptive to a student's learning needs. The impact of computers has not been generally felt in education due to lack of hardware, teacher training, and sophisticated software. and because current instructional software is neither truly responsive to student needs nor flexible enough to emulate teaching. Dr. Woolf taps into 20 years of research on intelligent tutors to bring designers and developers a broad range of issues and methods that produce the best intelligent learning environments possible, whether for classroom or life-long learning. The book describes multidisciplinary approaches to using computers for teaching, reports on research, development, and real-world experiences, and discusses intelligent tutors, web-based learning systems, adaptive learning systems, intelligent agents and intelligent multimedia. It is recommended for professionals, graduate students, and others in computer science and educational technology who are developing online tutoring systems to support e-learning, and who want to build intelligence into the system. Combines both theory and practice to offer most in-depth and up-to-date treatment of intelligent tutoring systems available Presents powerful drivers of virtual teaching systems, including cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the Internet Features algorithmic material that enables programmers and researchers to design building components and intelligent systems

The book describes multidisciplinary approaches to using computers for teaching, reports on research, development, and real-world experiences, and discusses intelligent tutors, web-based learning systems, adaptive learning systems, intelligent agents and intelligent multimedia.The impact of computers has not been generally felt in education due to lack of hardware, teacher training, and sophisticated software. and because current instructional software is neither truly responsive to student needs nor flexible enough to emulate teaching. Thomas Ford taps into 20 years of research on intelligent tutors to bring designers and developers a broad range of issues and methods that produce the best intelligent learning environments possible, whether for classroom or life-long learning.It is recommended for professionals, graduate students, and others in computer science and educational technology who are developing online tutoring systems to support e-learning, and who want to build intelligence into the system.

This volume explores advances in theory, research and technologies needed to advance the state of the art of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) for teams.

May the Forcing Functions be with You: The Stimulating World of AIED and ITS Research It is my pleasure to write the foreword for Advances in Intelligent Tutoring S- tems. This collection, with contributions from leading researchers in the field of artificial intelligence in education (AIED), constitutes an overview of the many challenging research problems that must be solved in order to build a truly intel- gent tutoring system (ITS). The book not only describes some of the approaches and techniques that have been explored to meet these challenges, but also some of the systems that have actually been built and deployed in this effort. As discussed in the Introduction (Chapter 1), the terms “AIED” and “ITS” are often used int- changeably, and there is a large overlap in the researchers devoted to exploring this common field. In this foreword, I will use the term “AIED” to refer to the - search area, and the term “ITS” to refer to the particular kind of system that AIED researchers build. It has often been said that AIED is “AI-complete” in that to produce a tutoring system as sophisticated and effective as a human tutor requires solving the entire gamut of artificial intelligence research (AI) problems.

May the Forcing Functions be with You: The Stimulating World of AIED and ITS Research It is my pleasure to write the foreword for Advances in Intelligent Tutoring S- tems. This collection, with contributions from leading researchers in the field of artificial intelligence in education (AIED), constitutes an overview of the many challenging research problems that must be solved in order to build a truly intel- gent tutoring system (ITS). The book not only describes some of the approaches and techniques that have been explored to meet these challenges, but also some of the systems that have actually been built and deployed in this effort. As discussed in the Introduction (Chapter 1), the terms “AIED” and “ITS” are often used int- changeably, and there is a large overlap in the researchers devoted to exploring this common field. In this foreword, I will use the term “AIED” to refer to the - search area, and the term “ITS” to refer to the particular kind of system that AIED researchers build. It has often been said that AIED is “AI-complete” in that to produce a tutoring system as sophisticated and effective as a human tutor requires solving the entire gamut of artificial intelligence research (AI) problems.

Design Recommendations for Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) explores the impact of intelligent tutoring system design on education and training. Specifically, this volume examines “Authoring Tools and Expert Modeling Techniques”. The “Design Recommendations book series examines tools and methods to reduce the time and skill required to develop Intelligent Tutoring Systems with the goal of improving the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT). GIFT is a modular, service-oriented architecture developed to capture simplified authoring techniques, promote reuse and standardization of ITSs along with automated instructional techniques and effectiveness evaluation capabilities for adaptive tutoring tools and methods.

Intelligent tutoring technology is on the verge of a breakthrough into the mainstream of training and education. Over the past 25 years, researchers have learned not only what it takes to develop an effective intelligent tutoring system (ITS), but also what it takes to deploy and use one--the true barometer of a technology's success. This volume brings together a cross-section of ITS researchers from academia, industry, and the government to talk about their experiences in ITS development and technology transfer, both successful and unsuccessful. Section 1 is devoted to detailed descriptions of tools and methods ITS developers can employ during development to facilitate technology adoption. It includes discussions of the paradigmatic change in learning and instructional design that ITS fosters, techniques for gathering design information for ITS domains where empirical or knowledge-based methods are inappropriate, and the conduct of cost-benefits analyses to facilitate ITS funding decisions. Sections 2 and 3 offer numerous case studies of ITS deployment from both industry and the government. All of these case studies--regardless of outcome--provide valuable insights into the dos and don'ts of ITS technology transfer. This volume will be an invaluable resource for all researchers and developers of ITS, as well as for managers and personnel in education and training organizations who must adopt and use ITS technology, and information systems and computing support organization professionals who must support it if it is to succeed.