Supporting teachers as content authors in intelligent educational systems

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.