Mobile educational features in authoring tools for personalised tutoring

Abstract— One important field where mobile technology can make significant contributions is Education. In the fast pace of modern life, students and instructors would appreciate using constructively some spare time that they may have, in order to work on lessons at any place, even when away from offices, classrooms and labs where computers are usually located. In this paper we describe a mobile authoring tool that we have developed and is called Mobile Author. Mobile Author can be used by human instructors either from a computer or a mobile phone to create their own Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and to distribute them to their students. After the ITSs have been created, students can also use any computer or mobile phone to have access to theory and tests. The tutoring systems can assess the students’ performance, inform the data-bases that record the students’ progress and provide advice adapted to the needs of individual students. Finally, instructors can monitor their students’ progress and communicate with their students during the course. The mobile features of both the authoring tool itself and the resulting ITSs from it have been evaluated by instructors and students respectively. The results of the evaluation showed that mobile features are indeed considered useful.