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The Course module manages all the didactic material provided by the pedagogue experts. It contains
all information about the pedagogical domains explained in the previous section. The Auditor module
distributes the requests to the other modules. It has been designed using the pattern facade (Gamma, Helm,
Johnson & Ulissides, 1995). It transmits the interactions considered relevant by the interface.
The Student Model module stores general characteristics as the login, password…. It also records
the student profile (multimedia, analytic) and the performance along the sessions with the system such as
concepts acquired, failed, etc. Some of these characteristics are gathered at the beginning of the course in a
general test carried out either by the system or by a specific exam.
The Intelligent module consults the Student model and makes intelligent decisions based on heuristically
defined tasks taken from Artificial Intelligence. It also compiles tests to evaluate sessions using
techniques borrowed from Item Response Theory (Weiss & Yoes, 1990) and Computer Adaptive Testing
(Hambleton, Zaal & Pieters). Besides, it requests data update in the student model as a result of certain operations
made by the student such as recording the results of a test, or navigation from a node to another in
the hypermedia.
The Teacher module provides tools to manage the behavior of the system to adapt better to the
students. With it teachers can supervise the learning and behavior of their students. They are able to access
the Student Model and examine its contents. Consult which activities, sessions, layers, courses have been
seen and which concepts have been passed and failed. This module also provides tools to build teacherdefined
sessions made up from activities existing in the system (by now). These sessions have the same
characteristics and treatment as the sessions compiled by the system autonomously. This system also provides
functionality to retrieve and assess those activities that the system is not able to evaluate autonomously.
Finally, there is a Communication Module that allows distribution among several machines of the
previously commented modules. It is implemented using CORBA (Urban-Lurain, 1997) programming environment.
Conclusions
EGA-Hezinet is the AHS built as a result of the project Hezinet. It demonstrates that AHS can be
built on the web even when the domain is large and complicated such as in this case the learning of a language.
The key techniques of this success relied on the experience of the project participants. Aurten Bai
gave a coherent and usable structure to the domain. The group of Hypermedia and Multimedia (GHM) of
the University of the Basque Country add to the system their background with some research prototypes of
AHS, such as HyperTutor (Pérez, Lopistéguy, Gutiérrez & Usandizaga, 1995) or WebTutor (Pérez & Gutiérrez,
1996).
The interface of EGA-Hezinet is plenty of functionality and offers great variety of activities. This
has been achieve thanks to the effort of Ibermática in the implementation and the design of up to 20 different
types of activities made by pedagogues of Aurten Bai. Also the efforts of adaptation included in the
system added by the GHM. The system has included currently some activities specially created by wellknown
Basque writers to encourage the students with some motivating narrations. And multimedia is
achieved adding animations, presentations and virtual tours through the Basque country using Macromedia
Director.
EGA-Hezinet is not another prototype. It is a commercial product obtained from research work
developed by the GHM. The system is going to be published soon, after it passes its evaluation period with
students of a high school. Our goal is to use this experience to develop other systems in other areas. The
group has already contacted other possible partners interested in include their domain in such an interactive
system.
References
Baker, N.C. (1993). Intelligent Tutoring Frameworks for Engineering. In Information Technology for Civil and Structural
Engineers, Proceedings of The Third International Conference in the Appli-cation of Artifical Intelligence to Civil
and Structural Engineering. B.H.V. Topping and A.I. Khan Editors, Civil-Comp Press. 295-300.