A Programming-by-demonstration Tool for Retargeting Instructional

Abstract

Although intelligent learning environments have proven to be successful instructional tools, they have seen little commercial success. Part of the problem has been the difficulty of authoring them, even using authoring tools specialized to the task. We argue that the authoring task can be redefined for environments based on the "plug-in" instructional architecture described by Ritter and Koedinger (1995). In systems using that architecture, specialized authoring tools can be developed for each component of the architecture, greatly simplifying both the authoring process and the task of creating authoring tools. We describe an authoring tool directed at creating the "translator" portion of such an architecture. This authoring tool uses programming by demonstration to allow a non-programmer to re-use existing tutoring agents with new interface tools.