Authoring Systems for Intelligent Tutoring Systems)

The first conference workshop on authoring tools for intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) was held at the AI and Education conference in 1995. Since then a number of workshops and symposia on ITS authoring, cost-effective production, and reusability have been offered and well attended (see "Related worksh ops and symposia " at the end of this article). The field has come a long way in the last decade, and the time is right to take stock of where we are. Submissions to this special issue were numerous enough to require that it be organized into two parts. We expect to have Part II of this special issue published within a year. In Part II this introductory paper will be expanded into a more complete overview of the state of the art in ITS authoring tools. ITSs go beyond trad itional computer based instruction (CBI) in trying to build models of subject matter expertise, instructional expertise, and / or d iagnostic expertise. This is done so that the content and feedback can be "intelligently " composed and sequenced, adapting to the student and the subject matter. Part I of this special issue includes five d iverse attempts at simplifying ITS construction. Despite the d iversity in approaches, we can see substantial agreement concerning the problems and challenges we face in our attempts to make advanced technology learning systems more cost effective. In various ways the au thors in this special issue begin by making the same arguments: intelligent tutoring systems can b