Application of an intelligent tutoring system in electrical power engineering

Computer aided learning methods and intelligent tutoring systems are now playing an important role in engineering education. They have the advantage of being able to expedite the teaching process and provide individualized tutoring and performance monitoring not bound by time. An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) has been developed to enable students to work independently and improve their understanding of engineering concepts and problem solving ability. ITS gives the students the opportunity to solve problems and to perform simulated experiments. It also provides general and task specific hints, which can be used by students to increase their understanding of the underlying concepts and thereby enhance the possibility of solving assigned tutorial and laboratory problems. ITS has the added advantage of being accessible over the network. Thus, students can log into the computer from any of several terminals around the University campus at any convenient time and access ITS. The performance of individual students is automatically logged and the lecturer has access to the log files. ITS also provides an automatic marking system which gives a student´s score at any stage, taking into consideration the amount of help the student has requested to complete the task. These features make ITS also suitable for class tests