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A WEB-BASED INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM ON TEACHING AND

LEARNING ELECTRICAL PROJECT

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 A WEB-BASED INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM ON TEACHING
AND LEARNING ELECTRICAL PROJECT
António Araújo Gomes1,Rui Miranda1; Zita Almeida do Vale1; Luiz Rocha Faria1
1
GECAD – Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Group, Instituto Superior de
Engenharia do Porto, Rua Dr. Bernardino de Almeida, nº431, 4200-072 Porto, Portugal,
aag@isep.ipp.pt; zav@isep.ipp.pt; lef@isep.ipp.pt

Abstract
The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) provide new strategies for disseminating
information and new communication models in order to change attitudes and human behaviour
concerning to education. Nowadays the internet is crucial as a means of communication and
information sharing. To education or tutorship will be required to use ICT, supported on the internet, to
establish the communication of teacher-student and student-student, disseminating the content of the
subjects, and as a way of teaching and learning process. This paper presents an intelligent tutor that
aims to be a tool to support teaching and learning in the field of the electrical engineering project.
Keywords: Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Adaptive Hypermedia, Knowledge Based Systems, Electric
Installation Design

1 INTRODUCTION
The teaching method, one to one, conducted by a human tutor, when compared with other teaching
methods, appeared to increase the effectiveness of the learning process [1].
However the performance of the human tutor, beyond the expertise in the learning field, is dependent
on areas such as communication and pedagogy [2].
Human tutors, who meet all of these features are scarce and expensive, so the use of computer
teaching systems whose performance approaches that given by human tutors, it is certainly an
advantage in the teaching/learning process as training basic and also as additional training in order to
update the knowledge.
Electrical project activity is extremely broad and distinct, requiring by one hand, a deep knowledge on
rules, regulations, materials, equipments, technical solutions and technologies and assistance in
several areas, on the other hand, also requires other skills, depending on the specific projects to be
implemented, being this knowledge a characteristic that belongs to the professionals with relevant
experience, in terms of complexity and specific projects that were made.
This additional empirical knowledge is missing in the academic instruction, so the academic instruction
must be completed with different kinds of knowledge, such as real-life practical examples and
simulations. On the other hand, the practical knowledge detained by the most experienced designers
is not formalized in such a way that is easily transmitted.
In order to overcome these difficulties present in the engineers formation, we developed an Intelligent
Tutoring System, for training and support concerning the development of electrical installation projects
to be used by electrical engineers, technicians and students [3].
The main goal of this work is twofold:
• Training of students in this domain knowledge;
• Updating of teachers and technicians on new technical solutions and legislation.
The goals stated above are being translated into:
• Creation of a knowledge base about electric installations projects;
2 INTELLIGENT TUTORING SYSTEM (ITS)

2.1 Used Platform

In this work, the AHA! Platform (Adaptive Hypermedia for All) was used, that is an open source
adaptative hypermedia system, developed in Eindhoven University of Technology, by the Database
and Hypermedia group, heads by Professor Paul De Bra [4].
The AHA! Platform runs on a Java HTTP server, such as Tomcat, and aims to facilitate the design of
web applications like adaptive hypermedia.
The AHA! is a powerful adaptive hypermedia engine and is supplied with some authoring tools which
assist the development process.

2.2 Requirements for the ITS

The developed ITS is intended to provide an interactive course to be used for two distinct types of
users [5] [6]:
 students from the Course Unit of electrical installations design
 professionals in the field of electrical installations design
Professionals of this field work are one system user with high knowledge domain that will use the
system to review the knowledge acquired during their academic training, and eventually to upgrade
they knowledge not only in terms of regulatory but also about technical and technological aspects.
The student from the Course Unit of electrical installations design, typically have limited knowledge in
the field of electrical installations design, however the system must assess the student knowledge
level, performing a diagnostic test in order not to teach the student knowledge that it already holds.
Thus the student is offered a personalized education.
The system must also perform a test to identify which learning style best suited to the user.
As to the ongoing exploration for knowledge discovery course, the system should adjust the level of
detail presented to the user's knowledge level.
The content must also be adapted by learning style, and must be shown another version of the
content if the user did not understand well the concepts (eg. failed validation test of learning).
Additionally the system should also allow content authors to query the usage habits of users logged
into the system.
Fig. 1 shows a schematic of the features mentioned above.

Fig. 1 Main features of the system from the end users point of view
2.3 Tools to be used with AHA!
2.3.1 WebService architecture
The WebService receives requests from remote machines to which they answered. Interacts with the
database of the AHA!, referring to it or updating it, answering requests from external servers or other
machines.
The webservice exposes a series of operations, web methods, to manipulate the user model and
domain model used by AHA!.
Fig. 2 presents an overview of the architecture and how the developed WebService interacts with
AHA!.

Fig. 2 Overview of Integration with WebService

2.3.2 Editor de conteúdos para o AHA!

AHA! requires all it’s content pages to be correctly formatted and valid XHTML. Creating such pages
an hard task and requires a lot of time.
Experts are defined as experts in the field of knowledge to teach, but hardly are proficient in XHTML
which makes creating and updating contents an even more complicated task.
Since there is no authoring tool for creating and editing content for the AHA!, that allowing a quick and
easy creation of new content and editing existing ones, such the quality of ITS is directly correlated
with the quality of the content, if not are conducted and updated appropriately, this can influence the
tutor success.
Thus, a tool authoring was developed whose main features developed from the author / content
manager point of view system are present in Fig. 3.
 Fig. 3 Editor main features content by the author point of view.

Each concept represents a content, and each content consists of at least one fragment. In the content
editor, the manager can also apply a series of rules for adjusting the fragment.
The fragment ceation is done an WYSWG (what you see is what you get) user interface, a preview is
shown in Fig. 4

Fig. 4 Content and fragments editor

2.3.3 Teste de Estilo de Aprendizagem
In order to identify the learning style preferences of the tutor users, students and professionals, was
created a diagnostic test based on the VAK learning styles model and VAK learning styles tests,
whose resolution is proposed at the first user interaction with the system that will determine the model
student and thus, the type of content that will be presented [7].
2.3.4 Diagnostic test
It was also developed an editor of diagnostic tests, in order to estimate the initial knowledge of the
students (does not apply to professionals), to set the initial state of the student, and finally the
presentation of the adaptation rules of navigation and adaptation of the presentation, determined
depending on the response to it. We consider professionals have a higher start up knowledge when
compared with students hence no diagnostic test is required.

2.4 Used Technologies

The project was developed on the operating system Linux Ubuntu, there have been used exclusively
open sourced technology and open source tools.
The main development used tools until now in the project were:
- Servers: Apache HTTP Server, Apache Tomcat, a http server which runs java servlets
- Programming languages: PHP, Java
- APIs working over the HTTP protocol: SOAP Webservice - Simple Object Access Protocol
- Data Bases: XML - eXtensible Markup Language

2.5 Developed Tutor

In the Fig. 5 we show the developed tutor system for electrical installation projects.

Fig. 5 Tutor system for electrical installation projects

3 CONCLUSIONS
An Intelligent Tutoring System in the field of Electric Installation Design will fill a gap in the learning
process structure, performing a function not fulfilled by anyone. It will also complement and improve
the tutoring process offered by other instructional techniques in the following aspects:
- The experts in the field of electrical installation design tend to be rare and usually they are not
available to assist novice designers;
- The training quality suffers from the lack of an evaluation mechanism and the fact that the same
training program is applied to all the participants;
- The trainees do not have to leave their working place since the tutor can be used through the
internet.
The teaching model proposed in this work is able to ensure adequate support of the trainees in the
acquisition of the different types of knowledge and expertise required to perform successfully the
design of electrical installations, since it defines different teaching technologies appropriated to the
acquisition of the heterogenic types of knowledge involved and to the user learning style. The Tutor
that endows the system with relevant knowledge to training in the field of electrical project, but also
confers sensitivity to the difficulties and skills demonstrated by the trainee and the ability to react
accordingly. It is a system capable of transmitting and assesses knowledge similar to a human tutor.
The use of these Tutors can therefore improve electrical installation designers' formation, which is
critical due to the lack of well-trained technicians in this area.
The developed tutoring system will be made available in January 2010 to some students and
professionals selected, in order to do the system verification and validation, to make the final
adjustments to ensure that the systems is ready for global use.

3.1 Future Work

As future work we highlight:
- save the statistics of use
- Generalize the editor contents to be distributed
- Generalize the web service that can be used with other tools in order to be distributed.

REFERENCES
[1] Bloom, B.S., “The 2-Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as
One-to-one Tutoring”, Educational Researcher, 13, 4-16, 1984

[2] Khuwaja, R.A., “A Model os Tutoring: Faciliting Knowledge Integration Using Multiple Models of
the Domain” PhD Dissertation, Department os Computer Science and Applied Mathematics,
Illinois Institute of Techonoly, Chicago, Illinois, 1994.

[3] Gomes A.A., Vale Z.M., Faria L.F., “Information and Communication Technologies in Education –
A Web-Based Intelligent Tutoring System on Teaching and Learning Electrical Project”,
INTED2010 – International Technology, Education and Development Conference, 2010, 8 a 10 de
Março de 2010, Valencia, Espanha.

[4] De Bra, P. and Calvi, L.: AHA! An open Adaptive Hyper-media Architecture. The New Review of
Hypermedia and Multimedia 4, 115-139, 1998.

[5] Gustavo Santos, António Gomes, Luís Faria, Sérgio Ramos, Zita Vale, “An Intelligent Tutoring
Approach to Support Students and Technicians in Electrical Installation Design”, IEEE Power
Engineering Society, General Meeting, 20 a 24 de Julho de 2008 Pittsburgh, PA, USA;

[6] Gomes A.A., Vale Z.M., Faria L.F., Guimarães L.M. “PEAPE – Portal de Ensino/Aprendizagem do
Projecto Electrotécnico”, SIIE09 – XI Simpósio Internacional de Informática Educativa, 2009, 18 a
20 de Novembro de 2009, Coimbra, Portugal.
 [7] Neil D Fleming, Teaching and Learning Styles; VARK Strategies, Stated 1st Edition edition, 2001.

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