One of the most interesting aspects of this week's affordances, particularly, Affordance #4 recursive feedback for me was understanding all the possibilities and potentialities of how the e-learning environment can model and provide effective formative assessment to students. Formative assessment is assessment during the learning process to help student learn and refine their understanding of what they need to know, for instance, Topic X. Formative assessments are different from summative assessments that rate and rank students according to numerical points and letter grades. Formative assessment are learning tools. So it was interesting for me to learn about the many ways in which the e-learning environment can provide formative assessments to students in virtual classes. Crowdsourcing peer reviews struck me as very interesting, so also the Socratic dialogic web potential of wikis and blogs and other web 2.0 technologies.

However, I am really excited and enthusiastic to learn more about "Intelligent Tutors" and how these new tutorial assistance programs will transform teaching and learning. According to a recent article in Education Week, "Artificially intelligent tutoring systems, or ITS, are computer programs that model students' psychological states as well as their prior knowledge to personalize instruction for them. As students interact with them, the programs collect data about how the students approach each problem, when they are likely to get frustrated, and so on. The system evolves in response to the people who use it, to improve the lessons and assessments it presents" (https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/09/27/how-intelligent-tutors-could-transform-teaching.html). I believe these intelligent tutoring programs could be of tremendous help to both the teacher and the student, particularly the student.

In particular, the ability of such programs to customize learning down to the psychological state and readiness of individual students can be of tremendous help to students. Normally in an in-person teaching situation, in the absence of intelligent tutor programs, if I have a student who finds it very hard to diagram a complex sentence with a subordinate clause in it, then I will sit with that student outside of class during my office hours and patiently work one on one with them going over the problem. Often I take the student back to the earlier lessons about particular phrases and different lesser syntactic rules to help them slowly work their way up to the question that stumped them. Sometimes this takes hours depending on the student and their readiness and state of mind and what they remember of the previous lessons. Now, if there is an intelligent tutor program that works at the level of the student and helps the student build up their knowledge from earlier lessons to the more complex one at hand, that would be a tremendous aid in learning not to mention greater self esteem for the student who will achieve mastery of the problem in a customized manner rather than a one lesson fits all approach.

Research from the United States Navy's intelligent tutor program, ITS, shows that the intelligent tutor can work at all levels of students: beginner, intermediate and advanced. "In the tutorial, you have a conversation, and the tutor-machine knows an awful lot about your background in the course and can build on that in a way you can't in a regular classroom," said J.D. Fletcher, a researcher with the Institute of Defense Analyses and a primary developer of the U.S. Navy's Digital Tutor ITS, which is used to train Navy staff for technical jobs in the force, such as troubleshooting systems on a ship. "Some of your kids will take one day what it takes others four days to learn. In a traditional classroom, the fast students are left twiddling their thumbs. ... If you have [an ITS] engaging in a conversation with you, the tutor can just keep piling on the questions to you that are progressively more difficult" (https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/09/27/how-intelligent-tutors-could-transform-teaching.html).

Here is a schematic of how students can interface with an intelligent tutor program showing how the student interfaces with the pedagogical module and the student and domain modules.

https://slideplayer.com/slide/10451020/

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have indicated that they are very close to having intelligent tutors that can train themselves by using Artificial Intelligence. These AI based intelligent tutors are self-learning computer programs which teachers can program, rather than AI researchers. "Using a new method that employs artificial intelligence, a teacher can teach the computer by demonstrating several ways to solve problems in a topic, such as multicolumn addition, and correcting the computer if it responds incorrectly. . . . The new method may enable a teacher to create a 30-minute lesson in about 30 minutes . . . ." (https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2020/may/intelligent-tutors.html?fbclid=IwAR33AXxaxxJxBao_W8XSRZiZx3n0CGdnB1mulyYqCDCy9NDNmeO6Ko0gtLA). This research sounds really exciting and cutting edge. I look forward to trying out one of these AI intelligent tutors in the near future.

References

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/09/27/how-intelligent-tutors-could-transform-teaching.html

https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2020/may/intelligent-tutors.html?fbclid=IwAR33AXxaxxJxBao_W8XSRZiZx3n0CGdnB1mulyYqCDCy9NDNmeO6Ko0gtLA

https://slideplayer.com/slide/10451020/

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-11-26-how-intelligent-tutoring-systems-make-deep-learning-possible