Title: Supporting teachers as content authors in intelligent educational systems

Authors: Peter Brusilovsky, Judith Knapp, Johann Gamper

Addresses: School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 135 North Bellefield Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. ' European Academy Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC), Institute of Specialised Communication and Multilingualism, Viale Druso 1, 39100 Bozen/Bolzano, Italy. ' Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Dominikanerplatz 3, 39100 Bozen, Italy

Abstract: Intelligent Educational Systems (IESs) need large amounts of educational content that is typically not provided by the creators of these systems. In this paper we discuss a new approach for authoring practical IESs where core authoring is done by professional design teams, while the educational content is mainly developed by teachers who use the system in their classes. The major bottleneck of this approach is the lack of intelligent authoring support tools that allow regular teachers to author intelligent content that an IES needs in order to perform its functions. As a contribution to solving this problem, we present our recent work on authoring support for an adaptive vocabulary acquisition system, ELDIT. The paper describes the ELDIT system, the needs and challenges of language content authoring by teachers, and the two authoring support components that we have developed for two essential kinds of language learning content: illustrative examples and educational texts.

Keywords: intelligent tutoring systems; intelligent educational systems; web-based IES; content authoring; authoring support; language learning; educational content; vocabulary acquisition; knowledge; learning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJKL.2006.010992

International Journal of Knowledge and Learning, 2006 Vol.2 No.3/4, pp.191 - 215

Published online: 26 Sep 2006 *

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