Thesis (M.S.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: Model Tracing; Intelligent Tutoring Systems; JESS production system; Debugging Tool; Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools. Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-60).

Thesis (M.S.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: Authoring Tools; Pseudo-tutors; Education; Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Includes bibliographical references (p. 37).

Accepted teaching and learning practices have undergone major changes during the past two decades. They have been underpinned by shifts in psychological and pedagogical theory, the most recent of which fit broadly under the heading of constructivism. During this time, there have also been significant changes in the development of Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) resources. These changes have tended to be driven by technological developments, such as the availability of desktop computers with multimedia capabilities, and more recently the increasing prominence of the Internet, rather than developments in teaching and learning theory. The aim of this research is to analyse the implications of a constructivist view of teaching and learning for the development of CAL resources. Specifically, the research attempts to describe the nature of constructivist CAL resources, before proposing a model for the development of such resources. The capabilities of existing tools for the development of constructivist CAL resources are also analysed. In looking at the nature of constructivist CAL resources, developments in pedagogical theory that have lead to the constructivist position are reviewed, along with constructivist theories of teaching practice. This body of theory is then synthesised into ten principles of constructivist teaching and learning. The implications of a constructivist view of teaching and learning for CAL resources are then examined. A range of constructivist CAL approaches are identified, and a classification scheme for constructivist CAL is proposed. This scheme involves the classification of a CAL approach according to the learner activities it facilitates, the input techniques used and the processing and output techniques used. The process of developing CAL resources is then addressed. The selection of CAL approaches that are likely to assist with the achievement of specific categories of learning outcome is recognised as being central to this process. Matrices relating categories of learning outcome to categories of learner activity and categories of learner activity to categories of input, processing and output technique are proposed. A model for developing CAL resources, that makes use of these matrices is proposed. In developing this model, instructional design models and software development models are reviewed. Finally, support provided by existing authoring tools, for the development of constructivist CAL resources using the proposed model is examined. Six of the most popular authoring tools, including tools designed primarily for CD-ROM based resource development and tools designed primarily for Web-based development are reviewed.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems are notoriously costly to construct, and require PhD level experience in cognitive science and rule based programming. The purpose of this research was to ease the development process for building pseudo-tutors. Pseudo-tutors are ITS constructs that mimic cognitive tutors but are limited in that they only apply to a single problem. The Assistment Builder is a tool designed to rapidly create, test, and deploy simple pseudo-tutors. These tutors provide a simplified cognitive model based upon a state graph designed for a specific problem. These tutors offer many of the features of rule-based tutors, but with shorter creation time. The system simplifies the process of tutor creation to allow users with little or no ITS experience to develop content. The system provides a web-based interface as a means to build and store these simple tutors we have called Assistments. This paper describes our attempt to make the process of developing, testing, and deploying content easy for teachers. We present data to suggest that users can develop a tutor that can be released to students in approximately an hour.

Training emergency response decision makers using live, virtual and/or constructive simulations can be highly complex since certain situations can generate stimulusresponse cycles that depend significantly on unpredictable human judgments. In particular, effective training scenarios require a combination of content contributed via pre-authored scripts and content generated dynamically during the training exercise. Large-scale exercises require multiple domain experts contributing oversight and content to the scenario as it proceeds. Such real-time adaptation requires situational and group awareness based on an understanding of pre-scripted materials and the adaptations of others. This thesis describes the evolution and evaluation of a collaborative graphical timeline system, called the Scenario Timeline System (STS), which facilitates asynchronous and synchronous collaborative timeline management, and its application in large-scale, computer-supported emergency response training exercises.

Thesis (M.S.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: intelligent tutoring systems; its; authoring tool; artificial intelligence. Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-82).

"Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) are computer based tutoring systems that provide individualized tutoring to the students. Building an ITS is recognized to be expensive task in terms of cost and resources. Authoring tools provide a framework and an environment for building the ITSs that help to reduce the resources like skills, time and cost required to build an intelligent tutoring system. In this thesis we have implemented the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT) and performed experiments to empirically determine the common programming errors that authors tend to make while building an ITS and study what is hard in authoring an ITS. The CTAT were used in a graduate class at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and also at the 4th Summer school organized at the Carnegie Mellon University. Based on the analysis of the experiments we suggest future work to reduce the debugging time and thereby reduce the time required to author an ITS. We also implemented the model tracing algorithm in JESS, evaluated its performance and compared to that of the model tracing algorithm in TDK. This research is funded by the Office of Naval Research (Grant # N00014-0301-0221)."

[pt] A cadeia de trabalho presente na criação, desenvolvimento e transmissão de conteúdo hipermídia compreende vários atores, ambientes e equipamentos, desde o criador do conteúdo, passando pelo programador da aplicação até o operador do serviço de transmissão. Estando cada um desses atores imersos em diferentes ambientes de trabalho, e com papéis específicos na criação e edição do conteúdo a ser entregue ao usuário final. Nos dias de hoje, até mesmo os usuários finais, no caso da TV os telespectadores, estão exigindo ferramentas que possam enriquecer o seu conteúdo local. Uma única ferramenta de autoria não é capaz de atender esses diferentes atores e requisitos. Atualmente, existem ferramentas de autoria focadas em satisfazer uma pequena parte desses atores. Mas, essa pequena parte não é satisfeita em sua plenitude, visto que tais ferramentas foram construídas, muita das vezes, com base apenas em requisitos funcionais. Este trabalho discorre sobre a importância de aspectos não-funcionais no desenvolvimento de novas ferramentas de autoria hipermídia. É proposta uma arquitetura que habilita ferramentas a atingir os requisitos específicos de cada ator no processo de criação de conteúdo hipermídia. Essa arquitetura é sustentada sobre extensibilidade, adaptabilidade, performance e escalabilidade. Visando testar a proposta deste trabalho foi desenvolvida uma ferramenta de autoria para aplicações NCL (Nested Context Language) que tem como base a arquitetura proposta. NCL foi escolhida por ser a linguagem padrão para o sistema declarativo (Ginga-NCL) de TV Digital Terrestre ISDB-TB e recomendação ITU-T para serviços IPTV. NCL permite a autoria de documentos hipermídia por meio de uma abordagem simples e expressiva. / [en] The chain of work present in the creation, development and transmission of hypermedia content includes several actors, environments and equipment, from the content creator, passing by the application developer all the way to the operator of the transmission service. Each of these actors is immersed in different work environments and has specific roles in the creation and editing of content being delivered to the final user. Nowadays, even final users are demanding tools that can enrich their content. A single authoring tool cannot meet these requirements and different actors. Currently, there are authoring tools focused on satisfying a small subset of these actors. But even this small part is not fully satisfied, since these tools were built, most of the times, based only on functional requirements. This work discusses the importance of non-functional aspects in the development of new hypermedia authoring tools. This dissertation proposes an architecture that enables tools to meet the specific requirements of each actor in the process of creating hypermedia content. This architecture relies on extensibility, adaptability, performance and scalability. In order to test the proposal of this work we have developed an authoring tool for applications NCL (Nested Context Language) that is based on the proposed architecture. NCL was chosen because it is the standard language for the declarative system (Ginga-NCL) part of the Terrestrial Digital TV of Brazil ISDB-TB and ITU-T IPTV services. NCL allows the authoring of hypermedia documents in a simple and expressive form.

[pt] Com o advento da adoção de um padrão de TV digital interativa pelo Brasil, tem crescido o interesse pela análise das possíveis alternativas nas mais diversas áreas que compõem um sistema de TV digital. No caso do Brasil, NCL é a linguagem declarativa adotada para modelagem de aplicações interativas no Sistema Brasileiro de TV Digital Terrestre (ISDTV-T - International System for Digital TV). Nesse contexto, este trabalho apresenta a ferramenta Composer, um ambiente de autoria voltado para a criação de programas NCL para TV digital interativa. Da mesma forma como no editor HyperProp, no qual é baseado, no Composer as abstrações são definidas nos diversos tipos de visões que permitem simular um tipo específico de edição (estrutural, temporal, leiaute e textual). Essas visões funcionam de maneira sincronizada, a fim de oferecer um ambiente integrado de autoria. Além de ter sua interface gráfica e funcional remodelada, principalmente a visão temporal, problemas de representação e edição de objetos de mídia, relacionamentos de sincronismo entre objetos, dentre eles os relacionamentos interativos, e edição ao vivo são tratados. Em resumo, o sistema proposto visa facilitar e agilizar a criação de aplicações voltadas para TV digital abstraindo do autor toda, ou pelo menos parte da complexidade de se programar em NCL através desse ambiente de autoria. / [en] With the advent of adoption of an interactive digital TV standard by the Brazilian government, the interest for the analysis of possible alternatives in several areas that compose a digital TV system has increased. In the case of Brazil, NCL is the declarative language adopted for modeling interactive applications in the Brazilian Terrestrial Digital TV System (ISDTV-T - International System for Digital TV). In that context, this work presents Composer, an authoring tool to create NCL documents for interactive digital TV. In the same way that in the HyperProp editor, in which it is based, in Composer the abstractions are defined using views that allow to simulate a specific type of edition (structural, temporal, layout and textual). Those visions work in a synchronized way, in order to offer an integrated authoring tool. Besides having the user and the functional interface remodeled, mainly its temporal view, problems of representation and edition of media objects, relationship problems, amongst then the interactive relationships, and live edition are treated. In summary, the proposed system tries to make easier the creation of documents for digital TV abstracting from the author all, or at least some complexity of programming in NCL using this authoring tool.

Thesis (M.S.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: Intelligent Tutoring Systems; Model Tracing; Machine Learning; Artificial Intelligence; Programming by Demonstration. Includes bibliographical references.