A tool-supported methodology for authoring intelligent tutoring systems

There is a great potential for the use of computers in industry and in formal education. Many of these institutions already possess powerful computer hardware, but the missing element is educational effective software that students find appealing and challenging. Intelligent Tutoring Systems, ITS, are generating a lot of interest in the research community. These instructional systems are so complex that many researchers are forced to limit their focus to one or more components of the system while ignoring the other components.; Our primary contribution to this field is the development of a new tool-supported methodology that creates a complete instructional system. We have, also, developed a new prototype system, Hypermedia Object-Based Intelligent Educator (HOBIE), that demonstrates our methodology. A second contribution is that we showed how to integrate the three disciplines of education, artificial intelligence, and software engineering.; We introduced two new artificial intelligence components that improve the effectiveness of our system for both authors and students. The first component uses a Hypermedia environment to implement a new meta-theory of Cognitive Associative Structures (CAS) to represent the content knowledge in a way that stresses relationships. The second new component is a Case-Based Instructional Strategy System. The system is initialized with a theoretically based prescriptive instructional strategy. As the system is used, one of these prescriptions is retrieved and is suggested to the author. The ITS author modifies this prescription and the modified prescription is stored for future reference. The system implements "learning by experience" to become a better instructor.; We developed new tools that extract the knowledge required by the system from the ITS authoring team which includes a content expert, an instructional designer, and a courseware developer. The object-oriented nature of the hypermedia environment offers an excellent interface for both author-system and student-system interaction.; Our tool-supported methodology offers assistance in the authoring process and can encourage the creation of more complete ITS. This will eventually lead to the production of ITS that can be empirically validated.