PARASITOLOGY TUTORING SYSTEM - A HYPERMEDIA COMPUTER-BASED APPLICATION

The teaching of parasitology is a basic course in all life sciences cu rricula, and up to now no computer-assisted tutoring system has been d eveloped for this purpose. By using Knowledge Pro (R), an object-orien ted software development tool, a hypermedia tutoring system for teachi ng parasitology to college students was developed. Generally, a tutori ng system contains a domain expert, a student model, a pedagogical exp ert and the user interface. In this project, particular emphasis was g iven to the user interface design and the expert knowledge representat ion. The system allows access to the educational material through hype rmedia and indexing at the pace of the student. The hypermedia access is facilitated through key words defined as hypertext and objects in p ictures defined as hyper-areas. The indexing access is based on a list of parameters that refers to various characteristics of the parasites , e.g. taxonomy, host, organ, etc. In addition, this indexing access c an be used for testing the student's level of understanding. The advan tages of this system are its user-friendliness, graphical interface an d ability to incorporate new educational material in the area of paras itology.