Breaking the ITS Monolith: a Hybrid Simulation and Tutoring Architecture for ITS

  • Authors:

  • William R. Murray

  • Affiliations:

  • Teknowledge Corporation, 1800 Embarcadero Road, Palo Alto 94303, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education: Supporting Learning through Intelligent and Socially Informed Technology
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

The classic ITS conceptual diagram with boxes for domain, user, and pedagogical modeling encourages a monolithic architecture. Furthermore, it focuses on knowledge and simulation of tutoring capability while deemphasizing knowledge and simulation of the task environment. However, the actual task environment may require complex domain and graphical simulations whose software investment vastly exceeds the ITS, even though these simulations are commingled with other aspects of the ITS in the classic box-diagram view. A more useful architecture for combining intelligent tutoring capabilities with complex pre-existing simulations (e.g., tactical simulations) views the ITS system as a tutor-simulation hybrid. The ITS consists of two communicating components, a simulation agent and a tutor agent. The tutor agent models the pedagogical capabilities of an expert instructor. The simulation agent is the simulation wrapped to send an event stream to the tutor, and to send and receive requests. This hybrid architecture breaks up an ITS monolith into two reusable components. It allows the tutor agent to be reused in multiple teaching applications with different simulations and vice versa. The V-CTC system, which provides a reusable tutoring component to provide ITS capabilities for tactical simulations, illustrates this architecture.