Intelligent Tutoring System for Distance Education

Abstract

This study aims to develop and implement a tool called intelligent tutoring system in an online course to help a formative evaluation in order to improve student learning. According to Bloom et al. (1971,117) formative evaluation is a systematic evaluation to improve the process of teaching and learning. The intelligent tutoring system may provides a timely and high quality feedback that not only inform the correctness of the solution to the problem, but also informs the students about the accuracy of the response relative to their current knowledge about the solution. Constructive and supportive feedback should be given to the students to reveal the right and wrong answers immediately after taking the test. A feedback about the right answers is a form to reinforce positive behaviors. Identifying possible errors and relating them to the instruction material may help student to strengthen the content under consideration. The remedial suggestion should be given for each answer with detailed prescription with regards the materials and instructional procedures before taking next step. The main idea is to inform the students what he has learned and what he still has to learn. The open-source LMS called Moodle™ was extended to accomplish the formative evaluation, high-quality feedback, and communal knowledge presented here with a short online financial math course that is being offered at a large University in Brazil. The preliminary results shows that the intelligent tutoring system using high quality feedback helped the students to improve their knowledge about the solution to the problems based on the errors of their past cohorts. The results and suggestion for future work are presented and discussed.