The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship? Intelligent Tutoring Systems and MOOCs

A key challenge in ITS research and development is to support tutoring at scale, for example by embedding tutors in MOOCs. An obstacle to at-scale deployment is that ITS architectures tend to be complex, not easily deployed in browsers without significant server-side processing, and not easily embedded in a learning management system (LMS). We present a case study in which a widely used ITS authoring tool suite, CTAT/TutorShop, was modified so that tutors can be embedded in MOOCs. Specifically, the inner loop (the example-tracing tutor engine) was moved to the client by reimplementing it in JavaScript, and the tutors were made compatible with the LTI e-learning standard. The feasibility of this general approach to ITS/MOOC integration was demonstrated with simple tutors in an edX MOOC “Data Analytics and Learning.”