Abstract:

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) provide new strategies for disseminating information and new communication models in order to change attitudes and human behaviour concerning to Education. Nowadays the Internet is crucial as a means of communication and information sharing. To education or tutorship will be required to use ICT, supported on the Internet, to establish the communication of teacher-student and student-student, disseminating the content of the subjects, and as a way of teaching and learning.
This paper presents an intelligent tutor that aims to be a tool to support teaching and learning in the field of the electrical engineering project.
Electrical project activity is extremely broad and distinct, requiring by one hand, a deep knowledge on rules, regulations, materials, equipments, technical solutions and technologies and assistance in several areas, as electrical equipment, telecommunications, security and efficiency and rational use of energy, on the other hand, also requires other skills, depending on the specific projects to be implemented, being this knowledge a characteristic that belongs to the professionals with relevant experience, in terms of complexity and specific projects that were made.
An Intelligent Tutor in this specific field will fill a gap in the learning process structure, performing a function not fulfilled by anyone. It will also complement and improve the tutoring process offered by other instructional techniques in the following aspects:
• the experts in the field of electrical installation design tend to be rare and usually they are not available to assist novice designers;
• the training quality suffers from the lack of an evaluation mechanism and the fact that the same training program is applied to all the participants;
• the trainees do not have to leave their working place since the tutor can be used through the internet.
The teaching model proposed in this work is able to ensure adequate support of the trainees in the acquisition of the different types of knowledge and expertise required to perform successfully the design of electrical installations, since it defines different teaching technologies appropriated to the acquisition of the heterogenic types of knowledge involved and to the user learning style. The Tutor that endows the system with relevant knowledge to training in the field of electrical project, but also confers sensitivity to the difficulties and skills demonstrated by the trainee and the ability to react accordingly. It is a system capable of transmitting and assesses knowledge similar to a human tutor.
In this work were used the following technologies: Web Technologies (XHTML, PHP, DOM), System Database (XML), Platforms (PHP, JAVA, and AHA Adaptive Hypermedia Architecture – AHA!), Web Servers (Apache and Tomcat), Web Services (Simple Object Access Protocol – SOAP).

Keywords:

Technological Issues in Education, Intelligent Tutoring Systems.