Future Trends

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The education and training field is changing dramatically, and businesses and organizations need systems to help them cope with the changes to become more effective. With the increasing use of networks and the Internet, more businesses, organizations, and institutions will be moving away from face-to-face group instruction to distributed learning. As a result, there is a sense of urgency to develop intelligent tutoring systems to provide effective training and education for learners and employees. Below are some trends in distributed learning that will have an impact on the design and development of an intelligent tutoring system:

1. Rather than present entire courses to learners, the content will be developed into different levels of granularity. The domain module will consist of many knowledge objects at different levels of granularity. After the intelligent tutoring system forms a profile of the student, the appropriate knowledge objects will be selected and packaged into learning objects. The pedagogical module will then use the profile of the students from the student model and the learning objects from the domain module and develop instructional strategies for each student, depending on the student’s preferences and learning style.

2. Because of the increasing emphasis on on-the-job and just-in-time training, intelligent tutoring systems must have the intelligence to identify weaknesses in employees’ problem-solving abilities and train for optimal performance. The domain module will have to be tied to the employees’ skills database to match employees to jobs and identify weaknesses. This will require integration of corporate information systems with the intelligent tutoring systems.

3. In the past, the development of educational courses and training materials took a very long time to develop. There is a trend to design and deliver learning materials instantaneously. The development time for intelligent tutoring systems for distributed systems will get shorter and shorter.

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