Evaluating the instructor support provided by a Web-based authoring tool for building adaptive courses

WEAR is an authoring tool for building Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) over the Web. The innovative feature of WEAR is its instructor modelling capabilities. In particular, WEAR maintains instructor models for the human instructors who author the ITSs in order to adapt the interaction with each instructor and provide individualised support to them throughout the ITS’s lifecycle. The instructor modelling component may then be used to promote the collaboration among instructors who share the same interests. In this paper, we report on an evaluation study that we conducted in order to examine the necessity and added value of the existence of an instructor modelling component in WEAR’s architecture. The results of the study are in favour of this component. Almost all instructors found useful to consult other peers through sharing the design of the course in order to redesign their course for future use. Furthermore, they showed interest in seeing the courses that were created by expert peers rather than courses created by novice ones. Evaluating the instructor support provided by a Web-based authoring tool for building adaptive courses Maria Moundridou, Maria Virvou Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus [email protected], [email protected]