Computing of educational paths based on the euclidean distance ability-to-learning object

An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is a software process aiming to adapt the provisioning of educational information to student´s needs and skills. An affective tutoring system (ATS) is an ITS platform that is focused on the affective status of the student user. The main components of the ITS/ ATS platforms are: the student module, the pedagogical module., the domain module (DM) and the dialog module. The DM keeps in a database the information about courses and tests. The pedagogical module manages all the strategies of teaching and it closely works with the DM. In this research it is offered a new way of designing the DM., enabling individualized interaction with the pedagogical module, based on a new concept of minimum Euclidean distance between a learning object and the student´s ability (EDALO)-related to this learning object which is described by a 3 × 5 Reusable Learning Object Matrix (3×5RLOM). It was considered the domain module structured as a collection of reusable learning objects (RLO). The evaluation of the student ability versus these RLO is based on the Item Response Theory. It defines the learning path as a choice - of the ITS/ ATS platform - for the most appropriate RLO set from a RLO repository dedicated to teaching of the same concept.