Having it all, maybe: Design tradeoffs in ITS authoring tools

Abstract

While intelligent tutoring systems are becoming more common and proving to be increasingly effective, each one must still be built from scratch at a significant cost. ITS Authoring tools, developed to address this issue, have a variety of purposes and intended users, and their design must account for tradeoffs among four overall goals: scope, depth, leamability, and productivity. We discussed how our system approaches these overall goals in terms of the four functional components of ITSs: the learning environment, the domain model, the teaching model, and the student model. Our research tires to find a balance among the goals which will yield a high level of all four, or at least investigate the possibility of excelling in all four areas.