ELM-ART: An Intelligent Tutoring System on World Wide Web

Making ITS available on the World Wide Web (WWW) is a way to integrate the flexibility and intelligence of ITS with world-wide availability of WWW applications. This paper discusses the problems of developing WWW-available ITS and, in particular, the problem of porting existing ITS to a WWW platform. We present the system ELMART which is a WWW-based ITS to support learning programming in Lisp. ELM-ART demonstrates how several known ITS technologies can be implemented in WWW context. 1 ITS Technologies and WWW Context WWW opens new ways of learning for many people. However, most of the existing educational WWW applications use simplest solutions and are much more weak and restricted than existing 'on-site' educational systems and tools. In particular, most WWW educational systems do not use powerful ITS technologies. A promising direction of research is to port these technologies to a WWW platform, thus joining the flexibility and intelligence of ITS with world-wide availability of WWW applications. Most of traditional intelligent techniques applied in ITS can be roughly classified into three groups which we will name as technologies: curriculum sequencing, interactive problem solving support, and intelligent analysis of student solutions. All these technologies are aimed at supporting the "intelligent" duties of the human teacher which can not be supported by traditional non-intelligent tutoring systems. Curriculum sequencing and intelligent analysis of student solutions are the oldest and best-studied technologies in the domain of ITS. Most ITS developed during the first 10 years of ITS history belong to these groups. The technology of interactive problem solving support is a newer one, but it is more "intelligent" and supportive (it helps the student in the most difficult part of the learning process and provides the most valuable support for the teacher in the classroom). It is not surprising that it became a dominating technology during the last 15 years. The WWW context changes the attitudes to traditional ITS techniques [Brusilovsky, 1995]. For example, interactive problem solving support currently seems to be a less suitable technology for WWWbased ITS. Vice versa, the two older technologies seem to be very usable and helpful in the WWW context. Intelligent analysis of solutions needs only one interaction between browser and server for a complete solution. It can provide intelligent feedback and perform student modeling when interactive problem solving support is impossible. Curriculum sequencing becomes very important to guide the student through the hyperspace of available information. In addition to traditional ITS technologies, some of more recent (and much less used) ITS technologies become important. Two examples are adaptive hypermedia [Beaumont & Brusilovsky, 1995] and example-based problem solving [Weber, 1995]. This paper discusses the problems of developing WWW-based ITS and, in particular, the problem of porting existing ITS to a WWW platform. We present the system ELM-ART which is an ITS to support learning programming in Lisp. ELMART is developed on the base of the system ELM-PE [Weber & Möllenberg, 1994] specially to be used on WWW. The presentation is centered around intelligent features of ELM-ART (a number of interesting non-intelligent features of ELM-ART are described elsewhere [Schwarz, Brusilovsky & Weber, 1996]). The goal of the paper is to demonstrate how several known ITS technologies can be implemented on WWW and what has to be added when porting a traditional ITS to WWW.