World-Wide Intelligent Textbooks

New WWW technologies allow for integrating distance education power of WWW with interactivity and intelligence. Integrating on-line presentation of learning materials with the interactivity of problem solving environments and the intelligence of intelligent tutoring systems results in a new quality of learning materials that we call 13_ textbooks. In this paper, we describe the development of ELM-ART, an I 3-textbook for learning programming that can be accessed via Internet and that is based on the on-site learning environment ELM-PE. Distance learning with Internet opens new ways of learning for many people. Now, educational programs and learning materials installed and supported in one place can be used by thousands of students from all over the world. World Wide Web (WWW) and WWW browsers provide a good example of powerful modern Internet facilities. Using WWW, a novice user can comfortably browse the Internet finding required pieces of information in different locations worldwide. From the very early days of WWW, there were many trials to use WWW facilities for distance learning. Being a good general tool for Internet navigation, however, WWW and current WWW browsers are not specially designed for distance education. Thus, most existing educational WWW applications use only simple solutions and are much weaker and more restricted than existing 'on-site' educational systems and tools. A number of powerful technologies which proved to be very effective in 'on-site' education are still not implemented within the WWW framework. Two advanced educational technologies are of special interest to us: interactive hypermedia textbooks and intelligent tutoring systems. A prominent goal of the project we are working at is to integratedistance education' power of WWW with interactivity and intelligence offered by these advanced technologies.