A student gets a more abstract knowledge from lectures and text books, while he acquires an imagination of the spatial properties of the organs by dissecting cadavers and from anatomical and other medical atlases. Integration of this knowledge acquired from such fundamentally different sources is a difficult and mostly tedious task. These systems provide a rich structure of references between logically related informations. Comfortable tools are available, easing both design and use of hypermedia applications. As a major drawback, however, a hypermedia screen usually can only display predefined texts or images.
User interaction remains thus basically the same as studying a conventional book.
The latter, which we developed in the last three years at our institute, is presented in some detail. It is shown how both methods and hypermedia techniques might eventually be merged. These systems are especially useful for teaching complex cognitive skills, such as decision making in medical diagnostics. It should be noted, however, that applications remain limited to such domains which can be formalized. Some major components of an intelligent tutoring system are a knowledge base , which explicitly models the knowledge to be communicated, an interpreter which can draw conclusions from the knowledge, and an explanation component .