High-level tools and languages for faster Intelligent Tutoring System(ITS) model development

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) hold the promise of dramatically increasing the cost effectiveness of training. However, one contributor to the per-lesson cost effectiveness of ITSs is the significant effort that goes into creating instructional material. ITSs in many ways shift the costs of giving instruction to the costs of preparing instruction. Preparation costs generally are quite high. In spite of ITSs being generally successful and mature technology, the DoD in general and the US Navy in particular have been hesitant to adopt it. There are three significant properties of the state of the art that contribute to this situation: domain specificity, domain unsuitability, and the high cost of instruction preparation. SoarTech, together with the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), will address these issues with the FACITS (Fast Authoring of Content for Intelligent Tutoring Systems) design study to investigate, develop, and evaluate ITS authoring tools that will provide general and reusable authoring abstractions, support dynamic and ill-defined training domains, and significantly reduce the cost of authoring new instructional material.