Knowledge Based Tutor Authoring Tools

My focus has been on designing systems that allow practicing educators and instructional theorists to participate more completely in the design of advanced technology instructional systems (including intelligent tutoring systems and knowledge based tutors). My research interests include the representation and acquisition of instructional expertise and subject matter knowledge, interoperability and reusability in computer based instruction, and shared vocabularies and ontologies. Currently I am managing an R&D project at the University of Massachusetts Center For Knowledge Communication. The goal of the project is to produce an authoring system for knowledge-based multimedia instruction. The system, called Eon, facilitates the creation of generic instructional strategies and the re-use of instructional content in building highly interactive teaching systems which adapt to the pedagogical needs of the student. (see http://www.cs.umass.edu/-tmurray/eon_www/eon.html for the Eon project home page, and http://www.cs.umass.edu/~tmurray/papers.htm for a list of downloadable publications). Recently I have also been working on models for "distributed curricula" which enable tutorial resources to intelligently invoke each other over the WWW.