ELM-ART: An Intelligent Tutoring System on World Wide Web

ELM-ART: An Intelligent Tutoring System on World Wide Web

Peter Brusilovsky, Elmar Schwarz, and Gerhard Weber

1 ITS Technologies and WWW Context WWW opens new ways of learning for many people. However, most of the existing educational WWW applications use simplest solutions and are much more weak and restricted than existing 'on-site' educational systems and tools. In particular, most WWW educational systems do not use powerful ITS technologies. A promising direction of research is to port these technologies to a WWW platform, thus joining the flexibility and intelligence of ITS with world-wide availability of WWW applications. Most of traditional intelligent techniques applied in ITS can be roughly classified into three groups which we will name as technologies: curriculum sequencing, interactive problem solving support, and intelligent analysis of student solutions. All these technologies are aimed at supporting the "intelligent"duties of the human teacher which can not be supported by traditional non-intelligent tutoring systems. Curriculum sequencing and intelligent analysis of student solutions are the oldest and best-studied technologies in the domain of ITS. Most ITS developed during the first 10 years of ITS history belong to these groups. The technology of interactive problem solving support is a newer one, but it is more "intelligent" and supportive (it helps the student in the most difficult part of the learning process and provides the most valuable support for the teacher in the classroom). It is not surprising that it became a dominating technology during the last 15 years. The WWW context changes the attitudes to traditional ITS techniques [Brusilovsky, 1995]. For example,interactive problem solving support currently seems to be a less suitable technology for WWWbased ITS. Vice versa, the two older technologies seem to be very usable and helpful

 ITS中应用的大多数传统智能技术可以大致分为三类，我们将其称为技术：课程排序，交互式问题解决支持以及学生解决方案的智能分析。

in the WWW context. Intelligent analysis of solutions needs only one interaction between browser and server for a complete solution. It can provide intelligent feedback and perform student modeling when interactive problem solving support is impossible. Curriculum sequencing becomes very important to guide the student through the hyperspace of available information. In addition to traditional ITS technologies, some of more recent (and much less used) ITS technologies become important. Two examples are adaptive hypermedia [Beaumont & Brusilovsky, 1995] and example-based problem solving [Weber, 1995] . This paper discusses the problems of developing WWW-based ITS and, in particular, the problem of porting existing ITS to a WWW platform. We present the system ELM-ART which is an ITS to support learning programming in Lisp.ELMART is developed on the base of the system ELM-PE [Weber & Mˆllenberg, 1994] specially to be used on WWW. The presentation is centered around intelligent features of ELM-ART (a number of interesting non-intelligent features of ELM-ART are described elsewhere [Schwarz, Brusilovsky & Weber, 1996]). The goal of the paper is to demonstrate how several known ITS technologies can be implemented on WWW and what has to be added when porting a traditional ITS to WWW.The goal of the paper is to demonstrate how several known ITS technologies can be implemented on WWW and what has to be added when porting a traditional ITS to WWW.The goal of the paper is to demonstrate how several known ITS technologies can be implemented on WWW and what has to be added when porting a traditional ITS to WWW.

2 ELM-ART ELM-ART (ELM Adaptive Remote Tutor) is a WWW based ITS to support learning programming in Lisp. ELM-ART is based on ELM-PE [Weber & Mˆllenberg, 1994], an Intelligent Learning Environment that support example- based programming, intelligent analysis of problem solutions, and advanced testing and debugging facilities. For several years, ELM-PE was used in introductory Lisp courses at the University of Trier. The course materials were presented to students in lecture form (complemented with printed material ) and ELM-PE was used to practice the obtained knowledge by problem-solving. ELM-ART, which is expected to be used for distance learning, provides on-line both the course materials and the problem solving support.ELM-ART can be considered as an on-line intelligent textbook with an integrated problem solving environment (we call it I3 textbook, or intelligent interactive integrated textbook). It provides all the course materials (presentations of new concepts, test, examples, and problems) in hypermedia form. ELM-ART differs from simple WWW "hyperbooks" in two major aspects. First, ELM-ART "knows" the material it presents to the students and supports them in learning and navigating the course material. Second, all examples and problems (which are important components of any textbook) in ELM-ART are not just a text as in other textbooks, but "live experience". Using ELM-ART, the student can investigate all examples and solve all problems on-line . For any textbook problem,ELM-ART provides the student with almost the same level of intelligent problem solving support as the original ELM-PE. All these features of ELM-ART are presented below in more detail.

2.1 On-line Course Material The course material in ELM-ART is provided on WWW in hypertext form. It consists of two main components: the textbook and the reference manual. The textbook (which is an on-line version of the normal printed Lisp textbook used in the courses during the last years) is hierarchically structured into units of different level: chapters, sections, and subsections. Each of these units can be presented to the student as a WWW "page" which shows the content of this unit ( text and pictures) and various kinds of links from this unit to related elements of the course. All problem solving examples and problems are presented on separate "interactive" pages which use the possibilities of WWW fill-out forms. The reference manual provides the reference access to the course material. Each "page"of the manual contains a brief explanation of one of the course concepts and the links to the related course units and to related manual pages. Thus, the manual in ELM-ART performs also the role of glossary and index of traditional textbooks. Two kinds of links are used in the course: normal hierarchy links and contentbased links. The hierarchy links connect a higher level unit (like a chapter) with all its subunits (like sections in this chapter) and in other direction - each unit with its parent unit. Content-based links can be provided by ELM-ART because the system "knows" what is presented on each page of the course material, ie, which concepts are introduced, presented, or summarized in each subsection, which concepts are demonstrated by each example , and which concepts are required to solve each problem. As a result,the system can provide references from each textbook page (including example and problem pages) to corresponding manual pages for each involved concept. Vice versa, from each manual page describing a concept (for example, a Lisp-function) the system can provide references to all textbook pages where this concept is introduced, explained, or summarized, to all example pages where it is demonstrated, and to all problem pages which can be used to master this concept. The links within the manual are also content-based links. The system "knows" the pedagogical structure of the Lisp domain and the relationships between various concepts. All these relationships are shown as links on the manual pages. Finally, the system "knows" the structure of any problem solving example. Thus, it can provide "similarity"links from each example to other most similar examples. This feature is based on the EBR method [Weber, 1995].

2.2 Adaptive Navigation Support ELM-ART provides many more opportunities for browsing the course materials than traditional on-line textbooks. The negative side of it is that there is a higher risk for the student to get lost in this complex hyperspace. To support the student navigating through the course, the system uses two adaptive hypermedia techniques - adaptive annotation and adaptive sorting of links. Adaptive annotation means that the system uses visual cues (icons, fonts, colors) to show the type and the educational state of each link. Using the student model (an individual permanent student model is maintained for each registered student), ELM-ART can distinguish several educational states for each page of material (including problem, example, and manual pages): the content of the page can be known to the student, ready to be learned,or not ready to be learned (the latter case means that some prerequisite knowledge is not yet learned). The icon and the font of each link presented to the student are computed dynamically from the individual student model (Figure 1). They always inform the student about the type and the educational state of the node behind the link. Adaptive sorting is used to present similarity links between cases. Since the system can measure the similarity between each two cases, it can also sort all cases related to the current one according to the similarity values. Links are presented in sorted order - the most relevant first - so the student always knows what the most similar cases are.The icon and the font of each link presented to the student are computed dynamically from the individual student model (Figure 1). They always inform the student about the type and the educational state of the node behind the link. Adaptive sorting is used to present similarity links between cases. Since the system can measure the similarity between each two cases, it can also sort all cases related to the current one according to the similarity values. Links are presented in sorted order - the most relevant first - so the student always knows what the most similar cases are.The icon and the font of each link presented to the student are computed dynamically from the individual student model (Figure 1). They always inform the student about the type and the educational state of the node behind the link. Adaptive sorting is used to present similarity links between cases. Since the system can measure the similarity between each two cases, it can also sort all cases related to the current one according to the similarity values. Links are presented in sorted order - the most relevant first - so the student always knows what the most similar cases are.Since the system can measure the similarity between each two cases, it can also sort all cases related to the current one according to the similarity values. Links are presented in sorted order - the most relevant first - so the student always knows what the most similar cases are.Since the system can measure the similarity between each two cases, it can also sort all cases related to the current one according to the similarity values. Links are presented in sorted order - the most relevant first - so the student always knows what the most similar cases are.

2.3 Prerequisite-based Help The system knowledge about the course material comprises knowledge about what the prerequisite concepts are for any page of course material including example and problem pages. As a rule, the prerequisites are not shown directly. But, they can be shown to the students in the following two cases. First, when a student enters a page which is not yet ready to be learned, the system warns the student that this material has unlearned prerequisites and shows additional links to textbook and manual pages where the unlearned prerequisite concepts are presented. This feature adds intelligent help and implicit guidance to hypermedia freedom of navigation. Second, when the student has problems with understanding some explanation or example or solving a problem, he or she can request help (using a special button) and,as an answer to help request, the system will show the links to all pages where the prerequisite knowledge is presented. 2.4 Intelligent Problem Solving Support As ELM-ART is a system that supports example-based programming, it encourages the students to re-use the code of previously analyzed examples when solving a new problem. The hypermedia form of the course and, especially, similarity links between examples help the student to find the relevant example from his or her previous experience. An important feature of ELM-ART is that the system can predict the student way of solving a particular problem and find the most relevant example from the individual learning history. This kind of problem solving support is very important for students who have problems with finding relevant examples. Answering the help request ("show example"on Figure 2), ELM-ART selects the most helpful examples, sorts them according to their relevance, and presents them to the student as an ordered list of hypertext links. The most relevant example is always presented first, but, if the student is not happy with this example for some reasons, he or she can try the second and the following suggested examples.

If the student failed to complete the solution of the problem, or if the student can not find an error which was reported by the testing component, he or she can ask the system to diagnose the code of the solution in its current state. As an answer, the system provides a sequence of help messages with more and more detailed explanation of an error (Figure 2). The sequence starts with a very vague hint what is wrong and ends with a code-level suggestion of how to correct the error or how to complete the solution. In many cases, the student can understand where the error is or what can be the next step from the very first messages and do not need more explanations. The solution can be corrected or completed, checked again, and so forth. The student can use this kind of help as many times as required to solve the problem correctly. In this context,the possibility to provide the code-level suggestion is a very important feature of ELM-ART as a distance learning system. It ensures that all students will finally solve the problem without the help of a human teacher.

3 Implementation of ELM-ART

3.1 Knowledge

The key to the intelligent behavior performance of ELM-ART is the knowledge about the subject domain and about the student which is represented in the system in several forms. The major part of the ELM-ART knowledge base consists of the knowledge about problem solving in Lisp which is represented as a network of concepts, plans, and rules. Most of this knowledge, as well as tools to work with it were inherited by ELM-ART from its mother, ELM-PE [Weber, 1996]. To support all intelligent techniques that are used to work with the course material we have enhanced ELM-ART knowledge base with the conceptual knowledge about Lisp and with the knowledge about the course. We have applied an approach described in [Brusilovsky, 1992] to represent this knowledge.The core of this knowledge is the Lisp conceptual network (LCN) which represents all important concepts used in the course and all relationships between them. The kinds of represented concepts include several kinds of Lisp objects (functions, data objects, data types) and several kinds of high level concepts related with Lisp and programming. Each represented concept has a corresponding page in the ELM-ART reference manual. Two main types of relationships in LCN are the traditional "partof" and "is-a". The prerequisite relationships between concepts are not represented directly, but the system is able to compute them from part-or and is-a relationships using several heuristics. To represent the conceptual knowledge of individual students the system uses a traditional weighted overlay student model. In particular,this model is used by ELM-ART to compute the current educational state for each concept that are shown to the student by adaptive visual cues.
为了表示有关该课程的知识，学习材料的所有最终单元（说明，示例和问题）均由LCN概念进行了索引。这意味着，对于每个单元，我们都提供了与此单元相关的概念列表（我们将其称为该单元的列表范围）。对于每个涉及的概念，单元的范围还表示关系的类型或概念的作用。例如，可以在一个解释单元中引入，呈现，总结一个概念，或者作为该单元的前提概念。
3.2平台
ELM-ART1的WWW实现基于Common Lisp Hypermedia Server CL-HTTP [Mallery，1994]。 CL-HTTP2是功能齐全的HTTP服务器，完全在Common LISP中实现。由于原始的ELM-PE系统也是在Common LISP中实现的，因此CL-HTTP似乎是实现我们目的的最佳平台。 CL-HTTP提供了一个通用网关接口3来处理通过Internet来自世​​界各地的传入URL。为了使服务器能够响应特定的URL，该URL必须与LISP中实现的响应功能相关联。响应传入的请求，服务器识别URL，调用关联的函数，并返回由该函数生成的HTML页面。接收到的URL和可能包含任意数量的传入数据的封闭表单值将作为函数参数提交。该函数生成HTML页面作为自适应响应。为此，该函数可以使用一组特殊的HTML生成函数。有了这样的体系结构，CL-HTTP是一个非常灵活且功能强大的工具，用于在WWW上实现智能应用程序。由于调用了LISP函数来处理请求，因此可以使用CL-HTTP将任何用LISP编写的交互式或智能工具连接到WWW。
3.3功能调整页面。
该系统的重要特征是，当用户请求时，动态呈现给用户的所有页面都是自适应生成的。为了生成页面，系统使用课程文本（存储为带注释的HTML文件）和有关课程结构的知识。组装课程页面时，ELM-ART从HTML文件中提取所请求单元的文本，并从知识库中生成页面的其余部分（页眉，页脚，层次结构链接和基于内容的链接）。参考手册页的情况更加灵活，因为对于大多数手册页而言，不仅链接，而且内容本身都是从知识库中生成的。使用这种方法，可以轻松实现上面介绍的ELM-ART的所有自适应功能，例如用于尚未准备好学习的页面的附加标题或根据其学习状态对链接进行自适应注释。关于适用于链接的自适应注释的方法的信息可以在其他地方找到[Beaumont＆Brusilovsky，1995]。解决问题的支持。为了集成各种形式的问题解决支持，我们提供了一个基于表单的界面，用户可以通过该界面将LISP表达式发送给ELM-ART进行评估或发送问题解决方案进行分析。一个有待解决问题的页面被实现为HTML填充表单4，该表单具有用于填充LISP代码的插槽和用于向系统请求不同反馈的几个按钮（图2）。例如，插槽“解决方案”必须用问题解决方案的代码填充，并且相关的按钮用于定义，测试和诊断插入的解决方案。当用户“按下”这些按钮之一时，带有表单附加内容的HTTP请求将发送到服务器。服务器调用负责的LISP功能来处理解决方案。处理功能为从ELM-PE继承的ELM-ART的不同组件（评估器，测试器，诊断器等）提供了接口：它们为这些组件准备数据并将其输出转换为HTML形式。所有这些组件的功能在其他地方均有介绍[Weber＆Mˆllenberg，1994]。这里最高级的情况是诊断程序的接口。正如我们上面提到的，诊断程序会从提示到代码级建议生成多个级别的帮助，并且不应将这些帮助一步一步地呈现给用户。当前，通过在填写表格的可滚动窗口中显示诊断反馈来实现此功能，以便一次仅可见一条消息。用户可以逐步浏览这些消息，直到他或她理解问题为止。
4。结论
本文介绍的ELM-ART系统是在WWW上实现的ITS的示例。 ELM-ART提供对超媒体结构的学习资料的远程访问，其中包括解释，测试，示例和问题。与传统的电子教科书不同，ELM-ART为学习者提供了智能的导航支持，并提供了玩示例，解决问题和获得智能解决问题的支持的能力，而这通常只能由人类老师提供。 ELM-ART集成了电子教科书，学习环境和智能辅导系统的功能。 ELM-ART还可以作为一个很好的例子，讨论在WWW上实现和移植ITS系统的问题。它表明，某些ITS技术（例如解决方案的智能分析和基于示例的问题解决）可以相对容易地移植到WWW上下文中。它显示了在线课程材料的重要性以及自适应超媒体和课程排序技术的重要性，这些技术可以帮助学生浏览该材料。从实际的角度来看，ELM-ART演示了使用Common Lisp Hypermedia Server CL-HTTP在WWW上实现ITS的有效方法。我们将在WWW上实施ITS的问题视为ITS研究的重要方向。 WWW可以帮助ITS从实验室转移到真实的教室。在WWW上下文中，ITS可以位于研究实验室的HTTP服务器上，该实验室具有运行智能系统的强大设备，而ITS专业人员则可以支持和更新系统。同时，来自世界各地的学习者可以使用任何WWW浏览器访问这些ITS。这些浏览器需要相对便宜的硬件，并且可以在几乎任何平台上运行。它为ITS提供了真正的全球受众，并提供了无限的数据源来测试和改善其功能