An online adaptive tutoring system for design-centric courses

An adaptive teaching strategy can be defined as an optimal instruction that effectively meets the individual needs and is conveyed toward a student´s different aptitude i.e., intellectual abilities, personalities, and cognitive styles of learning. It is widely adopted in teaching students with disabilities. The adaptive teaching pedagogy exploits interactions between learners and educator and is one of the best strategies to meet the different learning styles of individual student. The adaptive teaching creates a teaching and learning environment that improves the learning efficiency. This paper presents an online adaptive tutoring system (ATS) that is aimed at alleviating some of the problems that are faced by large class teaching. The ATS represents a knowledge domain as a concept structure and models the student with Bayesian networks. Based on the Bayesian student model, the tutoring system provides individualized tutoring and instant feedback to each student. The system has been applied in teaching digital circuit design in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of National University of Singapore. The survey conducted indicates the effectiveness of the proposed ATS-based teaching strategy.