Multimodal Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), also known as Intelligent E-learning Systems, is the task of providing individualized instruction, by being able to adapt to the knowledge, learning abilities and needs of each individual student. The offer of the ITS is increasing at an unrestrainable pace (Butz & Hua, 2006; Chen, 2008; Reategui & Boff, 2008; Roger, 2006). The “intelligence” in these systems is seen through the way they adapt themselves to the characteristics of the students, such as speed of learning, specific areas in which the student excels as well as falls behind, and rate of learning as more knowledge is learned. However, they are still not as effective as one-on-one human tutoring. We believe that an important factor in the success of human one-on-one tutoring is the tutor’s ability to identify and respond to the student’s attention information and affective state. In ITS, these two characteristics may give the student the sensation that there is someone behind the program who follows his learning development and cares about him as a human tutor would. In this paper, we propose the Multimodal Intelligent Tutoring Systems (MITS), which detects the attention information and affective state and uses the information to drive the agent tutor to individualize interaction with the learner.