Cognitive Tutors Produce Adaptive Online Course: Inaugural Field Trial

We hypothesize that when cognitive tutors are integrated into online courseware, the online courseware can provide a new type of adaptive instructions, such as impasse-driven adaptive remediation and need-based assessments. As a proof of concept, we have developed an adaptive online course on the Open Learning Initiative OLI platform by integrating four new instances of cognitive tutors into an existing OLI course. Cognitive tutors were created with an innovative cognitive tutor authoring system called Watson. To evaluate the effectiveness of the adaptive online course, a quasi-experiment was conducted in a gateway course at Carnegie Mellon University. The results show that the proposed adaptive online course technology is robust enough to be used in actual classroom with mixed effect for learning.