Improving Educational Content: A Web-based Intelligent Tutoring System with Support for Teacher Collaboration

Hobbs, Bryan

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Improving Educational Content: A Web-based Intelligent Tutoring System with Support for Teacher Collaboration

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Collaboration among teachers in some shape or form is becoming increasing popular among the educational system. The goal of this thesis is to determine whether teachers find value in collaboratively working in a Web environment and if we can use collaboration to improve educational content. We took a Web-based intelligent tutoring system, called ASSISTments, and incorporated a collaboration feature allowing teachers from around the Web to work together to create content for their students. The previous ASSISTments model did not allow for any form of collaboration; teachers using ASSISTments were not able to modify each other's content. By creating the opportunity for teachers to work together, we hypothesized that the educational content within ASSISTments would improve. To help improve education content among ASSISTments, we also deemed it necessary to improve the tool that teachers used to create problems for their students. Using surveys and interviews, we obtained feedback from teachers supporting our changes of the ASSISTments system and validating our claims that they found value in collaboratively working in a Web-based environment.

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