ABSTRACT
This chapter describes WITS, a research and development effort to build a production-quality authoring system to support rapid development of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) for software applications. It discusses the lessons we learned from building ITS authoring systems for use by a corporate training department and building ITSs for deployment in work centers. The WITS project evolved from a single-person summer project into a full-scale development project. One of the major goals of the WITS project was to produce an authorable ITS for software applications. The authoring process for an ITS usually mirrors the parts of the tutoring system: the simulation and/or interface, the student model, the teaching model, and the expert or domain model. In 1988, an online training system for Plug-in Inventory and Control System / Mechanized Order Acknowledgment was developed as a proof-of-concept prototype.
