Adapting Intelligent Tutoring System for Assessing Collaborative Skills

The Army's vision of the future included an Objective Force, a highly-mobile and lethal organization of warriors, which will be supported by the Future Combat Systems, consisting of a systems infrastructure that will integrate training, operations, and maintenance. The Objective Force will be required to rapidly assemble and deploy units in response to the dynamic environment such as the recent war in Iraq. The ability to coordinate these operations successfully will hinge upon the team performance skills of these distributed units. Consequently, team performance training is a necessity in achieving the vision of the Objective Force. Due to the distributed nature and rapid response of the Objective Force, training will need to be conducted in the field or remote locations. Technology innovations have resulted in intelligent tutoring systems to provide instructor-less training on a PC or other mobile computing device. However, intelligent tutoring technology has thus far focused on individual training. This Phase I effort will build upon the current intelligent tutoring technologies to extend their applicability to design a collaborative training intelligent tutoring architecture. In Phase II, this architecture will be implemented as a collaborative intelligent tutoring prototype.