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Expert Module
Expert Module’s main role is to make decisions that are used by Pedagogical Module for generating teaching plans
and adaptive presentation of the teaching material. In many traditional ITS systems these roles are in the charge of
the pedagogical module, but we decided to separate them in two distinct modules in order to increase the flexibility
of the system.
One of the main tasks performed by this module is selection of instruction plan items that best suit to a particular
student’s knowledge level (Fig. 3). This is a three-step process which starts with the creation of a concepts plan. To
create such a plan, Expert Module uses a set of facts about the student (from the Student model), the set of available
domain concepts (from the Domain model), and a rule for concepts selection. Expert Module selects concepts having
minimal (i.e. entry) knowledge level lower or equal to the student’s current knowledge level and having all of the
prerequisites satisfied. In other word, Expert Module will not choose those concepts that it believes the student is not
ready to learn yet, neither will it select a concept whose prerequisite (some other concept) the student has not passed
yet. This process repeats each time the student knowledge level is changed. The created concepts plan is displayed to
the student in the form of adaptive Content menu (Fig. 1A).
When the student or the system selects the concept to be learnt next, Expert Module proceeds to create a detailed
lesson plan. In the final step a test plan is created. DEPTHS does not create a detail lesson and test plan for each
concept because there is a chance that some of them will not be needed (depending on the student’s performance).
These two steps will not be described in detail here since that issue is out of the scope of this paper (Jeremic, 2005).
Figure 3. The process of creating Instructional plan in Expert module
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