Tutoring & Help System

1. Tutoring & Help System CSE-435 Nicolas Frantzen

2. Why Learning ? “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.” Chinese Proverb

3. How to Learn? “ I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. ” Confucius

4. Overview • A few facts… • What are Intelligent Tutoring Systems ? • General concepts of Case-Based ITS • CBITS in real life : concrete examples • Perspectives • Demo of an ITS The fun part !

5. A few facts… • Intelligent Tutoring systems (ITS) were born in the 70’s • Became popular in the 90’s • Today about 6% of high-school in USA utilize ITS as a support in the learning process

6. What are ITS ? • System that provides personalized tutoring by : • Generating problem solutions automatically • Representing the learner’s knowledge acquisition processes • Diagnosing learner’s activities • Providing advices and feedback

7. Conventional Model

8. The 3 main components of an ITS… • The Student Model • The Pedagogical or Tutor Model • The Domain Knowledge

9. …and their interaction

10. The Student Model Keeps track of all information related to the learner : • Description of student behavior with regard to a specific problem • Performance concerning the material being taught • Misconceptions • Knowledge gap How long should we keep the information?

11. The Tutor Model • Information about the teaching process: • When to review ? • When to present new topics? • What topics to teach? • Get input from the Learner model to make its decision to reflect the differing needs of each student.

12. The Domain Knowledge • Contains the information the tutor is teaching • Most important part of the ITS • Issues: • How to represent knowledge so it easily scales up to large domain? • How to represent domain knowledge other than facts and procedure (i.e. concepts and mental model)?

13. How to use CBR? • To represent the Student model and Domain Knowledge • There are different sources to obtain cases: • Produced by the learner himself • Experience from other learner • On-demand case generation • Predefined cases given by human tutors

14. General Concepts of CBITS • Where CBR technique become useful ? • During the Problem Solving phase : Find similar problem solved in the past to provide learner with past experience feedback. • Case-Based Adaptation • Case-Base Teaching Eureka !!

15. Case-Based Adaptation • Allows interactive system to adapt to a specific user (i.e CHEF cooking tutor) • Can be used to adapt interface component depending on the user’s knowledge of the software

16. Case-Based Teaching • Main goal is to provide learners with useful information (in order to understand new topics and to help during the problem solving phase). • Case-Based Teaching system are either: • Static (use given case base) • Adaptive (learn new case from learner experience)

17. General Concepts of CBITS (cont’d) • Different type of CBR methods: • Classification Approach (used to provide help on well known pre-analyzed cases) • Problem Solving Approach (to diagnose solution proposed by the learner and to identify the problem solving path used) • Planning Approach (to support planning in the system)

18. Case Representation • As a Complete case: Problem definition + detailed solution • As Partial Case (Snippet) : Subgoals of problems + solution within different contexts

19. CBITS in real life • CBITS have been used in many different areas : • Biology : INVISSIBLE (under construction) • Physics : ANDES • Math : ActiveMATH • Jurisprudence • Economics • The most popular ones are: • Programming : ELM-Art, SQL-Tutor, • Chess : CACHET But Why?

20. Further Work • Reduce development time and cost: • Using Authoring tools (API that would simplify programmer’s task to represent knowledge and teaching strategies) • Using Modularity of the student, tutor and domain models for future reuse • Collaborative Learning • Allowing student to interact (help) with each other while learning with an ITS • But problem concerning modeling student knowledge and defining teaching strategies

21. Developed in 1996 by Dr. Mitrovic from University of Canterbury, New-Zeland. • Provide a good “on-hand” practice to student discovering SQL • Teaching with example and built-in Database relations. • Useful feedback is given by the system

24. The Student Model • Use Constraint-Based Modeling (allows to reduce complexity by focusing on faults only)

25. Constraint Representation Use Pattern Recognition to match learner’s solution to possible constraints

26. Let’s have fun ! Start engine Demo of SQL-Tutor

27. What have we learn today? • ITS “give” personalized instruction • 3 main parts are: • The Student Model • The Tutor Model • The Domain Knowledge • CBITS use different approach: • Case-Based Adaptation • Case-Based Teaching (Static or Adaptive) • Classification • Problem-Solving • Planning

28. Conclusion • Still many areas in ITS are open • Developing Authoring tools • Increase modularity of ITS • Natural language Modeling • Collaborative Learning • ITS are becoming more and more popular as a good assistant to human tutors

29. Thank You !Happy Halloween !!!