Intelligent Teaching Assistant systems: helping teachers is also helping learners!

Dr Kalina Yacef
School of Information Technologies
University of Sydney

Tuesday 11th November 2003 at 11am

Abstract

The AIED (Artificial Intelligence in Education) community has devoted a lot of work over the past four decades to inventing principles and tools to assist learners, in particular through individualised learning. However much less attention has been paid to teachers, and to the reflection and monitoring that can be made to improve the teaching. Our approach, rather than solely helping learners, is to also help teachers to teach better and more efficiently. This is particularly relevant when teachers are a scarce resource, such as in classes with large numbers of students or in online education.

We will present two tools. First the Logic-ITA, a web-based Intelligent Teaching Assistant system that is currently used within the School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney. In addition to providing students opportunities to practice formal proofs in propositional logic whilst receiving feedback, it also keeps the lecturer informed about the progress the class is making and problems encountered. Second, Tada-Ed, a tool for visualizing and mining student data (answers as well as reasoning steps for delivering their answers) through clustering, classification techniques and association rule.

Short resume

Kalina Yacef has been a lecturer at the School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney since February 2000. Late 1999, she obtained a PhD from the University of Paris 5, fruit of an international collaboration with Airsys ATM (Melbourne) and CSIRO-MIS (Sydney). Her research lies within the field of Artificial Intelligence in Education. She has published about 30 papers in international conferences and journals. She is also a member of CRC Smart Internet Technology.