Subject domain organisation and teaching strategy for distance learning in the UnB Virtual Project Marco Carvalho University of Brasília E-mail: marco@cic.unb.br Abstract 1 - Introduction 1.1 - The uses of computer networks 1.1.1 - Network Goals The high availability of networked computers in universities and microcomputers with multimedia capabilities in homes and offices has led to an obvious outcome: the use of this media to convey university contents at distance. The Virtual UnB Project aims at making contents of regular and open courses available on the Internet. However, the guidance, evaluation and control of students' development are still very dependent on the teachers. Consequently it is proving very laborious for them to keep in pace with student's development. This paper describes a model to represent the subject domain and to code the teaching strategy for generating intelligent tutoring systems able to help teachers in tasks related to students' evaluation and guidance. 1.1.2 - Application of Networks 1.2 - Network Structure 1.3 - Network Architecture 1.3.1 - Protocol Hierarchies 1.3.2 - Design Issues for the Layers 1.4 - The OSI reference model 1.4.1 - The Physical Layer 1.4.2 - The Data Link Layer and so on. Many other examples could be given to show that in different areas authors organise the subject domain in a similar way, with variations in hierarchy representation. The subject domain can be expressed graphically through a knowledge tree. Figure 1 shows the knowledge tree for part of Tanenbaums's Computer Networks. 1. Introduction The Virtual UnB Project is aimed at making various contents of regular and open courses available on the Internet. Although the students can access the hypermedia documents of the courses, there are not yet standards for giving guidance and making the evaluation of the students in the Virtual UnB Project. A teaching strategy model was developed in the Literacy Teaching ITS Project ([1, 2]) to support intelligent tutoring system to teach literacy. The model is based on a taxonomy of the pedagogical terms integrated to the subject domain, to allow the expert teacher to express the contents structure and the teaching strategic rules. An overlay student model [3] is used to reflect the student's knowledge and to support the guidance offered. The contents of the subject domain are expressed in terms of the ``knowledge tree'', which is a hierarchical structure similar to the contents of most books and courses in different areas. For instance, the classic Tanenbaum's Computer Networks, a reference in its area, in its second edition, starts organising the subject domain as: Figure 1. Computer Network’s Partial Knowledge Tree. For each node of the tree (curriculum item) there are different teaching activities. The student's performances in these activities are assessed in some way and the teacher uses the assessment to apply the best strategy to induce the student's progress in the curriculum. In the original application to literacy the teaching activities were limited to lessons, examples, exercises and tests and were always assessed by the computer. Now we are working with an extendible taxonomy which gives the tutorial 327 0-473-08801-0/01 $20.00 © 2002 IEEE