Projects of electrical installations for private use require not only academic knowledge but also other types of more empirical knowledge.

This project consists of the development of an ITS, for training and support concerning the development of electrical installation project’s to be used by electrical engineers, technicians and students.

This project includes the development of a user model required to support the pedagogical decision making of the

Tutoring System. A library of cases/practical projects will be produced and a mechanism able to perform a matching between major features of cases and the related domain concepts will be implemented. A Cased-Based Reasoning framework will be devised for select, adapt and store cases/practical projects in order to offer personalized courses, improving adaptation to current trainee’s needs and preferences. Producing learner stereotypes using clustering techniques and comparing the stereotypes with individual learner models can accomplish the selection of the cases that allowed best past performances.

The Intelligent Tutoring System will be based on a client-server architecture where a part of its functionality will be implemented in Java and will work on the client side, and another part will work on the server side. The parts will communicate over the Internet. In the client side a Java applet, running in a Web browser, will implement a graphical interface which will be responsible to send to the server all the trainee actions and to show the feedback generated by the server.

In order to support collaboration between all learning entities, the tutor will include a suitable environment to support cooperative work between several students and between students and the tutorial system. While permitting different types of interaction between the different agents this framework shall be allow the tutor to apply different learning strategies, in order to tailor the tutoring process to the trainee’s characteristics.

The framework must not only address the issues related to information flow but also be able to motivate and facilitate the discussion as well as organizing the distributed decision process. The tutor will be divided in two modules. The first one is a tutoring module intended to teach the legislation and its practical application in the context of an electrical project. This module will also be in charge of the transfer of the knowledge needed to accomplish each phase of an electrical project. We plan to apply to this module the adaptive hypermedia technologies. The second one is a problem solving module where the learner will have the opportunity to develop a practical project with tutor support. This module will be based on the interactive problem solving technology.