Affiliations: Intelligent Computer Tutoring Group, Department
Computer, Science and Software Engineering, University of Canterbury, Private
Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand. http://www.ictg.canterbury.ac.nz/.
E-mail: {tanja.mitrovic,brent.martin}@canterbury.ac.nz | Lincoln University, Lincoln, New Zealand. E-mail: mcguigan@lincoln.ac.nz
Abstract: Over the last decade, the Intelligent Computer Tutoring Group (ICTG)
has implemented many successful constraint-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems
(ITSs) in a variety of instructional domains. Our tutors have proven their
effectiveness not only in controlled lab studies but also in real classrooms,
and some of them have been commercialized. Although constraint-based tutors
seem easier to develop in comparison to other existing ITS methodologies, they
still require substantial expertise in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and
programming. Our initial approach to making the development easier was WETAS
(Web-Enabled Tutor Authoring System), an authoring shell that provided all the
necessary functionality for ITSs but still required domain models to be
developed manually. This paper presents ASPIRE (Authoring Software Platform for
Intelligent Resources in Education), a complete authoring and deployment
environment for constraint-based ITSs. ASPIRE consists of the authoring server
(ASPIRE-Author), which enables domain experts to easily develop new
constraint-based tutors, and a tutoring server (ASPIRE-Tutor), which deploys
the developed systems. ASPIRE-Author supports the authoring of the domain
model, in which the author is required to provide a high-level description of
the domain, as well as examples of problems and their solutions. From this
information, ASPIRE generates the domain model automatically. We discuss the
authoring process and illustrate it using the development process of CIT, an
ITS that teaches capital investment decision making. We also discuss a
preliminary study of ASPIRE, and some of the ITSs being developed in it.
Keywords: authoring systems, ITS deployment environment, constraint-based ITSs, evaluation
