Intelligent tutoring systems evaluate student performance and provide coaching and feedback during and/or after exercises. Intelligent job aids help users execute procedures by providing step-by-step instructions. These systems use computable task representations that specify appropriate actions at each step. These knowledge representations must be expressive enough to enable detailed, context-sensitive guidance and feedback, handle the wide range of situations and anomalies that might occur, and accurately assess the various possible actions the student might take. Yet, these representations must also enable easy and rapid knowledge entry and maintenance of large collections of procedures and training scenarios.

This paper describes an intelligent job aid and integrated simulation-based tutoring system developed for the Air Force to help satellite operators carry out complex command plans. These systems use hierarchical, object-oriented task representations that enable rapid authoring by non-programmers while supporting sophisticated job aiding and student performance evaluation. For example, the tutoring scenario editor enables the instructor to create an initial solution template by demonstrating a correct sequence of actions. The instructor can generalize this template, so the tutoring system can recognize alternate orderings of actions, alternative sets of actions that accomplish the same task, and conditional actions that are appropriate in certain situations.

The job aid helps users execute procedures by presenting step-by-step instructions using HTML-formatted text and graphics, hyperlinks, and embedded graphical user interface components. It enables gradual automation by presenting instructions to the operator for some steps while automating other steps by computing values, interpreting data, recommending actions, and sending and receiving information with other systems and databases. Looping and branching enable the software to execute some steps repeatedly or only when certain conditions are true. A graphical overview of the steps hierarchical organization and flow-of-control helps operators and procedure authors quickly review and understand the procedure and maintain context during execution.