Practical Requirements for ITS Authoring Tools from a User Experience Perspective

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are not yet widely implemented in learning, despite the general prevalence of digital resources in educational and training environments. ITS have been demonstrated to be effective for learners, but ITS development is not yet efficient for authors. Creating an ITS requires time, resources, and multidisciplinary skills. Authoring tools are intended to reduce the time and skill required to create an ITS, but the current state of those tools is categorized as a series of design tradeoffs between functionality, generalizability, and usability. In practice, the former two factors matter little if potential authors disregard the ITS in favor of other solutions. In this sense, authors, not learners, are the primary users of an ITS; the user experience of authors is critical to greater ITS adoption at an organizational level. With those challenges in mind, ongoing work and lessons learned on the design of authoring tools are described for a specific ITS platform, the Generalized Framework for Intelligent Tutoring (GIFT). User-centered design considerations are examined through the lens of authors' goals, mental models for authoring, and the definition of authoring sub-roles. Recommendations for authoring tool design and future research directions for design research in authoring tools are discussed.