Towards Enabling Collaboration in Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Intelligent Tutoring Systems have historically been shown [Koedinger, Anderson, Hadley & Mark, 1997; Morgan & Ritter, 2002] to be an effective means of educating an audience. While there is great benefit from such systems they are generally very costly to build and maintain. Currently it is estimated that 200 hours of time is required to produce one hour of Intelligent Tutoring Systems content [Murray, 2002; Anderson, 1993]. For Intelligent Tutoring Systems to be widely accepted in the classroom environment there needs to be a tool set that allows for the most novice user to maintain and grow the system with minimal cost. The goal of this work is to create such a tool set targeted towards the Assistments Project [Razzaq, Feng, Nuzzo-Jones, Heffernan, & et. al., 2005] and enable teacher collaboration within the system. A goal of the Assistments Project is to provide a means for teachers to obtain meaningful data from the system that they utilize in the classroom environment thus enabling a comprehensive learning solution. Introduction The focus of this work is aimed at providing teacher tools and a means to collaborate with users in the Assistments Project [Razzaq & et. al., 2005; Nuzzo-Jones, Walonoski, Heffernan, & Livak, 2005]. The Assistments Project is an Intelligent Tutoring System whose main goal is providing tutoring for middle and high school level mathematics. Currently the system is used in several Worcester Area Schools in preparation for the MCAS [Massachusetts DOE, 2005] exams. The system provides a means for teachers to assign these tutors to their students which provide meaningful feedback and directed instructional tutoring based on the student’s actions. “Collaboration” in the Assistment Project encompasses a teacher’s ability to share content, classes, and data with other system users. It is believed that this collaboration will lead to better results in content produced and teacher’s utilization of the system in their weekly lessons. Teacher will be able to create and assign content as well as manage their classes and students. For the Assistments Project to be successful the ability of users to self manage the system is a necessity. There is a need for a simple but powerful interface from which users, from differing privilege levels, are able to manage the user accounts that fall under their control. Currently three levels of control in the system exist. The levels are student accounts, who maintain their account, teacher accounts that maintain their accounts as well as administer their student’s accounts, their classes, and shared content, and finally there are system administrator accounts, who maintain all accounts. Background An important key to having a successful Intelligent Tutoring System is for the content creation tools to be extensible. For example a mathematics expert, a person who is a mathematics teacher or in another mathematics profession, should be able to easily create mathematical content to be deployed via the Intelligent Tutoring System with little to no knowledge of what an Intelligent Tutoring System is or does. While this work will be primarily oriented towards integration with the Assistments Project many other online tutoring systems exist; many of which provide the same rich features as the Assistments Project. The Online Learning Initiative (OLI) [CMU, 2003] from Carnegie Mellon University provides a collection of online tutors directed at many subject areas. While the OLI provides a wide range of online tutors, the tutors are lacking in extensibility resulting in a high cost for creating content. Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT) [Koedinger, Aleven, Heffernan, McLaren, & Hockenburry, 2004] from LearnLab also provides online tutors in addition to being extensible. However, CTAT lacks the administrative tools being investigated by this work. The National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST) [Vendlinski, Niemi, Wang, Monemoiur, & Lee, 2005] not only provides an online system but also has a collection of tools to support the creation and distribution of content. However the CRESST system does not offer tutoring, instead it allows for open ended questions that are then evaluated by a human teacher. SlideTutor [Crowley, 2005] is a domain specific web-savvy tutor system directed at the medical community. This system works well for its domain but is not very extensible beyond it. Within the Assistments Project there exists a subset of the required features for the Assistment Portal; the tool set that is to be created under this research. Originally the Assistment Portal was simply provided as a means to log into the system and begin your work. It consisted of a handful of basic functionality tailored to students and teachers. The students were able to create their account, view a list of assignments, and begin work on an assignment. Teachers were additionally given a list of the Assistments they had created plus access to the Assistment Reports [Feng, Heffernan & Koedinger, 2006] and the Assistment Builder [Turner, Macasek, Nuzzo-Jones, & Heffernan, 2005]. While this limited functionality proved to be adequate early on in the systems history eventually it was realized that a much larger tool set was needed to further the growth and development of the project. Two additional tools that fall under the domain of the Assistment Portal are the Curriculum Creator and the Curriculum Assigner. Theses tools allow for the creation of a curriculum from an existing set of Assistments and the subsequent assigning of the curriculums to teachers classes. A curriculum, from an ITS perspective, is a grouping of Assistments which defines an ordering that the Assistments are presented to the users. The tools were designed to be functional and only work for a specific subset of Assistments and fall short in ease of use. The Assistment Builder is an existing full-featured Assistment creation tool. An Assistment consists of a main question followed by a series of hints and/or follow-up questions whose goal is to assess as well as assist the students learning. While this tool does not fall directly under the domain of the Assistment Portal it is a tool that primarily teachers will have access to and will be integrated into the Assistment Portal to provide a more intuitive group of related tools. The created curriculums and Assistments are administered to students via the eXtensible Tutor Architecture which is the underlying framework of The Assistments Project. [Nuzzo-Jones & et. al., 2005] Description Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) have been proven to successfully aid student learning [Koedinger & et. al., 1997]. The current drawback of an ITS is that the creation and deployment of content requires extensive experience within the ITS discipline. Tools are needed to remove this steep learning curve allowing for an ITS to become common place in traditional school settings. Once a teacher can quickly and effectively distribute content to their students they can then utilize the feedback in the classroom setting to focus on under performing areas. Allowing teachers to take information from the ITS into the classroom will be the key for the future adoption of Intelligent Tutoring Systems and the creation a comprehensive learning solution. Such a solution hinges greatly on the successful development of tools that are usable by individuals from a limited ITS background. The main focus of this work is in the realm of teacher tools; however some improvements to the student’s portal will also be briefly discussed. Recent efforts in the Assistment Project have been made to further reengineer they system into separate well defined components [Nuzzo-Jones, Macasek, Walonoski, Rasmussen & Heffernan, 2006] to improve it modularity and extensibility. The Assistment Portal was redesigned to echo this new focus and as such each tool is designed independent of the others to allow for its modularity and extendibility. Tools can easily be swapped out of the system will no impact on other tools or functionality in the system. The only drawback in the design of the tools is that they are tied to our system as they utilize our very specific data model. As a result they are not pluggable into any arbitrary system as is; some modification is required to make them fit another systems data model. With the tools that have been added there is now significantly more functionality related to the development, deployment, and management of content as well as the added ability for teachers to manage their classes. The new underlining theme found in much of the Assistment Portal (see Figure 1) is collaboration. This collaboration is possible between teacher users as well as other content creators throughout the system. Figure 1. Assistment Portal; Teacher User Account Creation In order to use the Assistment System an account is required. This can be accomplished easily from our account creation page. Teacher Accounts can be created via our new account creation page. When an account is created it will be associated with a school, either already in the system or a newly created school, which will allow teachers the opportunity to collaborate among other teachers and content creators in that school and/or system wide. During teacher account creation initial classes can also be setup. These classes will then have associated assignments which are completed by students who join that particular class. Assistment Browser The Assistment Browser is a tool used for the manipulation of users Assistments. From the Assistment Browser it is possible to view your Assistments, “Released Assistments”, and any shared Assistments from other teachers. “Released Assistments” are Assistments that have been developed by the Assistment Project Team and are viewable by all users in the system. From the Assistment Browser a teacher is able to preview, edit, and markup content as long as that teacher has per