Authoring constraint-based tutors in ASPIRE: a case study of a capital investment tutor

Although intelligent tutoring systems have proven their effectiveness, they are still not widely spread due to the high development costs. We present ASPIRE, a complete authoring and deployment environment for constraint-based intelligent tutoring systems. ASPIRE consists of the authoring server (ASPIRE-Author), which enables domain experts (i.e. teachers) to easily develop new ITSs for their courses, and a tutoring server (ASPIRE-Tutor), which deploys the developed systems. We describe the authoring process supported by ASPIRE, and illustrate it on the example of an ITS that teaches Capital Investment decision making to university students.The ASPIRE project was supported by the eCDF grants 502 and 592 from the Tertiary Education Commission of New Zealand. We thank all members of ICTG for their support