Hyper-ITS: A web-Based architecture for Evolving and Configurable Learning Environment

Abstract

The World Wide Web facilitates co-operative teaching and learning, offering an exciting potential for sharing both the learning resources as well as the tasks of creating new learning resources through international collaboration. The mainstay of the web so far, the Hyper-text and Hyper-media offer a link based flexible architecture where addition, amendment and removal of material is relatively easy. This allows incremental construction and upgrading of web based systems to facilitate division of large tasks, easier prototyping and the ability to selectively update various learning resources to keep them current as well as to take advantage of improving technologies.

This paper proposes a web based architecture for intelligent tutoring systems that extends similar benefits to designing interactive learning, particularly with reference to Cognitive Apprenticeship Based Learning Environments (CABLE). Since the acquisition of cognitive skills is critical for learning any applied discipline, there will always be a need for interactive learning environments where the learner can practice to acquire new skills and to improve the grasp over any theoretical learning. Since the current web based learning systems cannot adequately provide for interactive learning that is supported by dynamic feedback, it is important to extend the benefits of the traditional ITS to the web based systems through a modular architecture supported by authoring tools and an indexing mechanism for the repository of the various tutoring components.