DTEx-Sys-a Web oriented intelligent tutoring system

Distance learning systems (DLSs) are a class of important services that information infrastructures have to provide users. DLSs base their operation on information access, electronic transaction and communication services furnished by information infrastructures. Regarding the teaching process, by using DLSs new paradigms enable users to distribute educational content to support interaction among user classes (instructor-student, student-student and student-educational institution), testing, evaluation, and eventually advice in different domain knowledge areas. Classification of DLSs depends on the way these paradigms are implemented. In this paper, we concentrate on a particular DLS class, which encompass systems based on enabling Web access to otherwise classical intelligent tutoring systems-Web oriented intelligent tutoring systems. In this paper we present one such system-distributed tutor-expert system (DTEx-Sys), which has been developed for asynchronous distance educational purposes. DTEx-Sys is designed as a 3-tier client-server architecture where the intelligent tutoring functions are separated from the user interface and the knowledge base(s). The system functionality comprehends knowledge base access for arbitrary domain knowledge, along with testing, diagnosing and evaluation of students´ work.