Intelligent Guide: Combining User Knowledge Assessment with Pedagogical Guidance

Despite their many successes, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are not yet practical enough to be employed in the real world educational/training environments. We argue that this undesirable scenario can be changed by focusing on developing an ITS development methodology that transforms current ITS research to consider practical issues that are part of the main causes of underemployment of ITSs. Here we describe an ambitious research project to develop an ITS that has recently completed its first phase of development at the Computer Research Institute of Montreal. This project aims to address issues, such as, making ITS handle multiple domains, developing cost-effective knowledge assessment methodologies, organizing and structuring domains around curriculum views and addressing the needs of users by considering their immediate goals and educational/training settings. This paper concentrates on the outcomes of the first phase of our project that includes the architecture and functionality (specially user knowledge assessment and pedagogical guidance) of the Intelligent Guide.