Page 84 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

4.3 Educational Technology from a System’s Perspective 73
4.3.2.3 Intelligent Tutoring System
The innovative feature of ICAI was to support individualized learning for students.
Intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is a typical instance of an ICAI system. ICAI and
ITS are often used interchangeably.
An ITS is a computer system that aims to provide immediate and customized
instruction or feedback to learners (Psotka, Massey, & Mutter, 1988), usually
without requiring intervention from a human teacher. It can assist students in
studying a variety of subjects by posing questions, parsing responses, and offering
customized instruction and feedback. During the rapid expansion of the web boom,
new computer-aided instruction paradigms, such as e-learning and distributed
learning, provided an excellent platform for ITS ideas.
The ITS is the typical educational technology system, including four technology
components: (1) domain model, (2) learner model, (3) pedagogical model, and
(4) interaction model. Figure 4.3 presents a typical ITS architecture.
(1) Domain Model
The term “domain” means a specific field or scope of knowledge, such as algebra,
critical thinking, and psychology. People who have a deep understanding of a
domain are called domain experts. A domain model represents domain experts’
ideas, skills, and the way that they solve domain problems. A good domain model
provides a structure to minimize domain experts’ authoring time and maximize the
quality of the content (Robert et al., 2013).
The domain model contains the set of skills, knowledge, and strategies of the
topic being tutored. It normally contains the ideal expert knowledge and also the
bugs, mal-rules, and misconceptions that students periodically exhibit (Robert et al.,
2013). The domain model consists of the concepts, facts, rules, and problem-
solving strategies of the domain in context. It serves as a source of expert
knowledge, a standard for evaluation of the student’s performance and diagnosis of
errors (Ahuja & Sille, 2013).

(2) Learner Model
We simply need to record, represent, and track characteristics of the learner before,
during, and after learning. The practical problem is that it is expensive to identify,
track, store, update, and later retrieve the ever-growing universal set of variables.

Domain model Learner model

Pedagogical model

Interface model

Student

Fig. 4.3 Typical architecture of an ITS. Adapted from Ahuja and Sille (2013)