Teacher Agents
Since their development in the 1980’s, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) have experienced a widespread success in such varying areas of education as military training, personal tutoring, and vocational instruction. ITSs are not without limitations, however, and have often proven to be costly and inflexible. Combining these systems with Intelligent Agents (IA), first proposed in the 1990s, is intended to address some of the shortcomings of ITSs; notably the cost of building new learning objects. While IA provide a mechanism for generating dynamic content tailored to a specific learner, a lack of standardization in IA ontologies and a narrow focus on pedagogy provides rich veins for reseach. In this paper we broadly survey the development of IAs in education with an eye towards further exploration of their possibilities.