Authoring tools would be more effective if authors were trained in the type of knowledge representation signified by the core tutor (e.g., if authors of cognitive tutors were first trained in writing the rules to represent the knowledge). General tools require extraordinary amounts of development work for designers and may be so general that resulting tutors are neither powerful nor intelligent. Authors must reason about which tutoring strategy to use next and in which context. On the other hand, general tutor tools are designed to produce a wide variety of tutoring systems, yet they require more knowledge about students, tutoring, or the domain and thus require larger learning curves for authors ( Murray et al., 2003). They have the obvious limitation that they only regenerate knowledge similar to the original tutor and result in production of more identical tutors. The tools often require simple input so nonprogrammers can use them and support extensions of given tutors. The more powerful the authoring tool, often the more limited the result. They are excellent at creating many, if limited, types of tutors that are powerful, because they encode the logic and reasoning of a working tutor and require less knowledge from authors.

Tutor-specific tools generally produce a copy of an existing tutor ( Murray, 1999b, 2003). In building authoring tools, the first issue is to decide whether the tool will produce specific tutors, designed for an explicit teaching niche, or whether it will produce general tutors, appropriate for many domains. The team building the authoring tools must identify the tutors, authors, and target audience ( Murray, 1999b Murray et al., 2003). However, detailed specific issues must be addressed for each tool developed. The primary goal is clear-to simplify the process of building tutors. Beverly Park Woolf, in Building Intelligent Interactive Tutors, 2009 10.3.2 Design tradeoffsĪuthoring tools are difficult to build and design tradeoffs confound this development process.

Different types of authoring tools