Opening Up an Intelligent Tutoring System Development Environment for Extensible Student Modeling

ITS authoring tools make creating intelligent tutoring systems more cost effective, but few authoring tools make it easy to flexibly incorporate an open-ended range of student modeling methods and learning analytics tools. To support a cumulative science of student modeling and enhance the impact of real-world tutoring systems, it is critical to extend ITS authoring tools so they easily accommodate novel student modeling methods. We report on extensions to the CTAT/Tutorshop architecture to support a plug-in approach to extensible student modeling, which gives an author full control over the content of the student model. The extensions enhance the range of adaptive tutoring behaviors that can be authored and support building external, student- or teacher-facing real-time analytics tools. The contributions of this work are: (1) an open architecture to support the plugging in, sharing, re-mixing, and use of advanced student modeling techniques, ITSs, and dashboards; and (2) case studies illustrating diverse ways authors have used the architecture

Can we Take Advantage of Time-Interval Pattern Mining to Model Students Activity?

International audienceAnalyzing students' activities in their learning process is an issue that has received significant attention in the educational data mining research field. Many approaches have been proposed, including the popular sequential pattern mining. However, the vast majority of the works do not focus on the time of occurrence of the events within the activities. This paper relies on the hypothesis that we can get a better understanding of students' activities, as well as design more accurate models, if time is considered. With this in mind, we propose to study time-interval patterns. To highlight the benefits of managing time, we analyze the data collected about 113 first-year university students interacting with their LMS. Experiments reveal that frequent time-interval patterns are actually identified, which means that some students' activities are regulated not only by the order of learning resources but also by time. In addition, the experiments emphasize that the sets of intervals highly influence the patterns mined and that the set of intervals that represents the human natural time (minute, hour, day, etc.) seems to be the most appropriate one to represent time gap between resources. Finally, we show that time-interval pattern mining brings additional information compared to sequential pattern mining. Indeed, not only the view of students' possible future activities is less uncertain (in terms of learning resources and their temporal gap) but also, as soon as two students differ in their time-intervals, this di↵erence indicates that their following activities are likely to diverge