Generic web-based adaptive tutoring system for large classroom teaching

Abstract

Teaching large classes is a very challenging task. It is necessary to investigate how to create intelligent educational tools to facilitate large classes teaching. Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHSs) are the two main techniques widely adopted to provide adaptive tutoring. ITSs provide adaptive tutoring for each student but do not give students freedom to explore the information space. AHSs enable student access to all learning material but can not perform direct guidance. Adaptive Tutoring System (ATS) is the proposed solution which integrates ITS and AHS together to provide a web-based interactive, adaptive and personalized environment. However building ATS from scratch is costly and time consuming. To reduce the ATS construction burden and enable ATS construction efficiently, a Web-based Authoring Environment (WAE) was developed and integrated into the traditional ITS infrastructure to form a Generic Web-based Adaptive Tutoring System - GWATS. The infrastructure of GWATS can be efficiently and effectively constructed with WAE. Meanwhile, GWATS is powerful enough to deal with the diversity and all the other problems met in large classes teaching. Most essentially, the GWATS enhances students learning performance. Three widely used evaluation methods are employed to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency and validity of GWATS. To reveal the impact of motivation states on learning performance, a prototype system is developed and its effectiveness is evaluated.