A new approach to ITS-curriculum and course authoring: the authoring environment

The aim of this paper is to present an authoring environment dedicated to the development of curriculum and course material that can be handled by an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). The adopted curriculum model is CREAM (Curriculum Representation and Acquisition Model) which represents subject-matter content from the domain, the pedagogical and the didactic points of view. The authoring environment, called CREAM-Tools, consists of a set of tools able to create and edit all bf the elements (domain knowledge, instructional objective, didactic resources, pedagogical and didactic model) of a curriculum. This set of tools contains, among others, graphical editors, intelligent assistance and knowledge browsers. The environment also includes a course generation kit that allows a designer to generate a course by specifying a target public and a course description. This paper also presents curriculum and course development approaches (methodologies). The delivery of curriculums and courses produced from this environment is done by an object-oriented ITS. The teaching process is supported by new technologies such as World-Wide Web browsers. We also show ways in which other modules in an intelligent tutoring system can exploit the resulting curriculums and courses in the teaching-learning process. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.