Computing of educational paths based on the euclidean distance ability-to-learning object

An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is a software process aiming to adapt the provisioning of educational information to student's needs and skills. An affective tutoring system (ATS) is an ITS platform that is focused on the affective status of the student user. The main components of the ITS/ ATS platforms are: the student module, the pedagogical module., the domain module (DM) and the dialog module. The DM keeps in a database the information about courses and tests. The pedagogical module manages all the strategies of teaching and it closely works with the DM. In this research it is offered a new way of designing the DM., enabling individualized interaction with the pedagogical module, based on a new concept of minimum Euclidean distance between a learning object and the student's ability (EDALO)-related to this learning object which is described by a 3 × 5 Reusable Learning Object Matrix (3×5RLOM). It was considered the domain module structured as a collection of reusable learning objects (RLO). The evaluation of the student ability versus these RLO is based on the Item Response Theory. It defines the learning path as a choice - of the ITS/ ATS platform - for the most appropriate RLO set from a RLO repository dedicated to teaching of the same concept.