Dynamic Courseware Generation: at the Cross Point of CAL, ITS and Authoring

This paper presents a further development of our architecture for dynamic courseware generation which allows explicit representation of teaching expertise. The instructional course is generated automatically for a given teaching goal and can be dynamically changed according to specified teaching rules to suit better the student's individual progress and preferences. The architecture of the system is based on explicit representation of the structure of the domain concepts and relationships (what has to be taught) and the instructional tasks and methods (how to teach). The separate representation of the actual teaching materials allows better flexibility and individualisation, as well as easier updating and re-use of ready CAL materials. In this way our approach provides an alternative to traditional CAL-authoring. An implementation of this approach in a simple engineering domain has been done and an attempt for evaluation of the advantages for authoring is presented.