Peer-Based Intelligent Tutoring Systems: A Corpus-Oriented Approach

Speaker: John Champaign, University of Waterloo

In this talk, we present an overview of our current researchon peer-based educational tutoring systems: a corpus-oriented approach. Our work takes as a starting point McCallas proposed ecological approach for the design of peer-based intelligent tutoring systems and proposes: (i) to develop an algorithm for selecting appropriate content (learning objects) to present to a student, based on previous learning experiences of like-minded students (ii) to build on this research by also having students leaving explicit annotations on learning objects to convey refinements of their understanding to subsequent students; the challenge is to intelligently match students to those annotations that will be most beneficial for their tutoring (iii) to develop methods for intelligently extracting learning objects from a repository of knowledge, in a manner that may be customized to the needs of specific students (iv) to apply our work to the specific application of assisting health care workers via peer-based intelligent tutoring, primarily for homecare environments.We describe each component of our model and offer both examples and experimental results to demonstrate the value of our approach. We conclude with some discussion of plans for future research.