Intelligence on the Web? Mia Stern, Beverly Park Woolf, and James F. Kurose Computer Science Department University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003 Phone: (413) 545-0582 Fax: (413) 545-1249 email: stern,bev,kurose @cs.umass.edu Abstract. This paper describes a courseware system delivered over the World Wide Web for transforming existing video-taped courses. The on-line courses take advan- tage of the interactivity and the individualized instruction of intelligent tutoring sys- tems. They use synchronized audio and HTML slides to present material to the stu- dent. An overlay student model records a student’s ability on each topic in the system, determined by which slides the student has seen and quizzes he has taken. This model is then used to help guide the student through the material, to provide interactive and adaptive quizzes, and to prefetch course material before it is explicitly requested, re- ducing the delays seen by the student. The first goal is accomplished by using adaptive hypertext techniques including adaptive navigation support and adaptive presentation. The second goal is achieved by dynamically constructing quizzes at the correct level of difficulty for the student. The third goal is accomplished by predicting the next actions the student will take, and preparing for them ahead of time. In this paper we discuss initial efforts to implement a student model for the kinds of web-based courses sup- ported in the system. We also discuss how the student model is used to accomplish the three goals. We conclude by providing a brief description of the first student encoun- ters with the system. 1 Introduction Many web based educational systems are equivalent to computer assisted learning systems, since they do not customize material to meet individual student needs. These systems are usually static and do not reason about the student, and thus are unable to personalize the interaction. MANIC (Multimedia Asynchronous Networked Individualized Courseware), on the other hand, is an intelligent tutoring sys- tem (ITS) delivered over the World Wide Web (WWW), which can customize the learning experience for each student. Courses using the MANIC system consist of synchronized audio and HTML slides as well as interactive quizzes. With the MANIC project, we are using existing technologies (such as WWW browsers and plugins, including RealAudio) and are augmenting these technologies with spe- cialized WWW servers and proxies to provide a more individualized learning experience. Although the audio and slides for a MANIC course are taken from existing video-taped courses, MANIC courses are not simply direct translations of those courses. By designing a course to be deliv- ered over the WWW, it can be considerably more interactive, thus allowing the student to take more control over his learning. Students interacting with the MANIC system have several options for view- ing the material. One option is to start the audio playback and let it continue until the end of the lecture. Because we are using the RealAudio client, we have synchronized the playback of the audio with the student’s viewing of the slides. Another option is for the student to control the playback of the au- dio, stopping and starting whenever he chooses. A third option is to “randomly” traverse the material,