Toward Cognitive Tutoring in a Collaborative Web-Based Environment

While intelligent tutoring has been applied to collaborative learning environments, it has met with little success so far because of the complexity involved in adding a tutoring component to a collaborative environment. We propose to tackle this problem by using Cognitive Tutors as the basis for our approach and by applying a technique we call Bootstrapping Novice Data (BND). The BND approach involves feeding student log files from a problem-solving tool into tutor development software to create the beginnings of a tutor for the tool. We describe an initial implementation of our approach in which Cool Modes, a collaborative software tool, is integrated with the Behavior Recorder, tutor-authoring software that supports development by demonstration. We show how our initial implementation provides a foundation for an intelligent tutor for collaboration. We also discuss some of the challenges ahead.