The IRIS Authoring Tool

Abstract

IRIS is an authoring tool developed to help human instructors to build intelligent teaching-learning systems in a wide variety of domains. The instructor/designer is required to produce a set of pedagogical requisites, which, in turn, are used to automatically configure a generic tutor architecture and produce an intelligent tutoring system. In order to provide IRIS with a sound basis for producing systems, a theory of instruction that integrates cognitive processes, instructional events and instructional actions has been considered. In this chapter we explain, through the analysis of the cognitive theory, the generic architecture. We present several system components, the requirements of the different components, and show how we integrate these components in IRIS. Moreover, we embed requirements, cognitive principles, and design requisites in an authoring tool in order that human instructors can follow them easily. Various design issues, an example of building a tutor for mathematical differentiation by using IRIS, and some experiences of use and evaluation are also presented.