Towards ITS Authoring Tool s for Domain Experts

The scarcity of efficient and user-friendly authoring tools has long been acknowledged as a limiting factor in the widespread development and deployment of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). Creating an effective authoring tool for domain experts poses two significant challenges: it must facilitate the creation of curricular content by domain experts who are typically neither ITS experts nor software engineers, and it must support the creation or modification of ITS-specific pedagogical strategies without exposing the complexity of the ITS itself to the domain expert. This paper presents a set of authoring tool design principles such as leveraging existing UI workflows, collaboration, and automation to improve the effectiveness of domain experts. Specifically, this paper examines the design of ITS authoring tools through the lens of software engineering. Taylor, R., Smith, A., Leeman-Munk, S., Mott, B., and Lester, J. (2014). Towards ITS Authoring Tools for Domain Experts. Proceedings of the ITS’14 Workshop on Intelligent Tutoring System Authoring Tools. Honolulu, HI.