Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors

Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors discusses educational systems that assess a student's knowledge and are adaptive to a student's learning needs.

The impact of computers has not been generally felt in education due to lack of hardware, teacher training, and sophisticated software. and because current instructional software is neither truly responsive to student needs nor flexible enough to emulate teaching. Dr. Woolf taps into 20 years of research on intelligent tutors to bring designers and developers a broad range of issues and methods that produce the best intelligent learning environments possible, whether for classroom or life-long learning.

The book describes multidisciplinary approaches to using computers for teaching, reports on research, development, and real-world experiences, and discusses intelligent tutors, web-based learning systems, adaptive learning systems, intelligent agents and intelligent multimedia.

It is recommended for professionals, graduate students, and others in computer science and educational technology who are developing online tutoring systems to support e-learning, and who want to build intelligence into the system.

"In one volume, Beverly Woolf provides a thorough and engaging introduction to the field of intelligent tutoring and related AI-based educational systems, covering the multiple approaches nascent in the field along with detailed case studies and the practical details of implementation. There is much to savor, both for the seasoned practitioner and those sampling the field for the first time."—William R. Murray, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist, Knowledge Systems Research, Boeing Phantom Works

"The book has broad coverage of all the interdisciplinary aspects that the field draws upon. No one, except an expert intelligent tutoring builder like Beverly could have written this book. She uses as examples of intelligent tutoring system from others leading intelligent tutoring, as well as talking about systems her and her colleagues have built."—Neil T. Heffernan, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Dept, Fuller Labs

"Woolf's Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors is a thorough, clear, logical description of the science, technology, methods, and rationale behind a very important, up-and-coming, educational technology: Intelligent Tutoring Systems. It will be very beneficial to developers and users (teachers and students) of ITSs and those who make instructional technology acquisition decisions. It's sure to become the standard, referenced ITS text." —Dick Stottler, President, Stottler Henke Associates, Inc.