The scrutable user model and beyond

This paper describes the um scrutable user modelling approach and explores the extension of the approach and philosophy into the teaching strategy. Essentially, um represents the evidence about the student in a form that can be scrutinised either directly, or via a graphical interface. This form of the student model is reusable by different teaching systems and other applications. It is only at the time-of-use, that the application resolves the student model, deciding the values of the components. The application can make use of its own resolver and, in particular, different applications may use different resolvers. Essentially, this means that the student scrutinising or examining their student model should logically be able to do this in terms of the way that the model is used in a teaching system. Another way to see this is that student should be able to explore the meaning of the student model in action, as it is used by a teaching system and in terms of the effects of the model. In this paper, we explore the design of a scrutable teaching strategy since this is the core of decision making process in a teaching system. Indeed, if we regard the operation of the teaching process as an important effect of the student model, then scrutinising the teaching strategy is a logical requirement of a scrutable but reusable and flexible student model.