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• Link removal – advanced students can choose the topics to learn by selecting appropriate links from the Content
menu (Fig. 1A). However, the links that the system considers inappropriate are removed, i.e. they are no longer
available.
Figure 1. Web-based GUI of DEPTHS
DEPTHS continually monitors the student’s behavior and performance and stores all the interaction data. This data is
used to refine the instructional plan, as well as to generate recommendations for the further work (Prentzas et al.
2002).
DEPTHS architecture
The architecture of DEPTHS (Fig. 2) follows the main guidelines for ITS architecture. In particular, it is widely
agreed that the major functional components of an ITS architecture should be: the domain knowledge model, the
student model, the pedagogical module, and the user interface (Hartley & Sleeman 1973, Burton & Brown 1976,
Wenger 1987). Accordingly the DEPTHS architecture consists of Pedagogical Module, Expert Module, Student
Model, Domain Model, and Presentation module (Jeremic & Devedzic 2004b). The user interface component of the
traditional architecture is adapted to the web-based environment and is dubbed Presentation Module in our model. In
the following subsections we describe each of these components in turn.
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