Instructional Support for Teachers and Guided Feedback for Students in an Adaptive eLearning Environment

Adaptive Tutorials are Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) in which students typically interact with a simulation towards a task-goal while being guided and remediated. Adaptive Tutorials can exhibit different kinds of feedback: students are given guidance based on their interaction, and teachers can also receive feedback on their own authoring choices to drive reflection and content adaptation. This paper will discuss different types of feedback which students are given within Adaptive Tutorials and their pedagogical utility. It will then look at providing teachers with timely support and feedback as well as post-hoc solution traces, to improve student learning. We suggest a refined ITS design and development lifecycle to better support teachers in the design of good pedagogy. We provide this in the form of the Adaptive eLearning Platform, which is a tool to support teachers in the adaptation of tutorials and the creation of customized student feedback. This in turn can result in an improved student experience, with more guidance and better learning.