Analyzing Design Process and Experiments on the AnITA Generic Tutoring System

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and redesign of the AnITA generic tutoring system, focusing on its architecture, usability, and experiments to enhance domain adaptability and reusability.

Contribution

It introduces a redesigned client/server version of AnITA (AnITA2) to improve usability and domain independence in tutoring systems.

Findings

AnITA2 architecture improved user understanding and interaction.

Experiments demonstrated enhanced reusability across domains.

Abstract

In the field of tutoring systems, investigations have shown that there are many tutoring systems specific to a specific domain that, because of their static architecture, cannot be adapted to other domains. As consequence, often neither methods nor knowledge can be reused. In addition, the knowledge engineer must have programming skills in order to enhance and evaluate the system. One particular challenge is to tackle these problems with the development of a generic tutoring system. AnITA, as a stand-alone application, has been developed and implemented particularly for this purpose. However, in the testing phase, we discovered that this architecture did not fully match the user's intuitive understanding of the use of a learning tool. Therefore, AnITA has been redesigned to exclusively work as a client/server application and renamed to AnITA2. This paper discusses the evolvements made on the AnITA tutoring system, the goal of which is to use generic principles for system re-use in any domain. Two experiments were conducted, and the results are presented in this paper.