This document reports the work done from 1.9.2005 to 30.11.2005 on the ASPIRE project, funded by the e-Learning Collaborative Development Fund grant 502. In this project, we will develop a Web-enabled authoring system called ASPIRE, for building intelligent learning agents for use in e-learning courses. ASPIRE will support the process of developing intelligent educational systems by automating the tasks involved, thus making it possible for tertiary teachers with little computer background to develop systems for their courses. The resulting educational systems will overcome the deficiencies of existing distance learning courses and support deep learning. The proposed project will dramatically extend the capability of the tertiary education system in the area of elearning.

In the first report on the ASPIRE project (Mitrovic et al., 2005), we presented the background for the project, functional specifications and the overall architecture of ASPIRE. ASPIRE consists of ASPIRE-Author, the authoring server, and ASPIRE-Tutor, the tutoring server which delivers the resulting intelligent educational systems to students. The first report also discussed the functionality of the system in terms of user stories, the knowledge representation language used for developing domain models, and finally presented the Session Manager, the first component of ASPIRE to be developed. This second report focuses on the work performed on implementing components of both ASPIRE-Author and ASPIRE-Tutor, and builds upon the information presented in the first report. Section 2 discusses the newly developed components of ASPIRE-Author. We start with the authoring process, and then in Section 2.2 describe the implementation of the general framework necessary for authoring, on which the further development is based. We present the package structure and discuss the classes developed. Next, Section 2.3 describes the Domain Structure component of the authoring interface, which allows the author to specify some features of the chosen instructional domain. Section 2.4. discusses the interface component for specifying the structure of problems and solutions. These specifications are stored as a part of the domain model, and later used for constraint induction. They are also necessary in order for the author to develop the student interface, and Section 2.5 describes the Student Interface Designer. Section 3 follows the same structure, starting with the description of the implemented framework, classes and packages of ASPIRE-Tutor. Then we describe the Diagnostic Module in Section 3.2, and the Student Modeller in Section 3.3. In order to provide persistence of student data, it was necessary to design and implement logging procedures. ASPIRE is being implemented in Allegro Common Lisp (Steele, 1990), an object-oriented language which supports the CLOS standard1 . For that reason, we decided to use AllegroCache 2 (Aasman, 2005), an object-oriented database management system which is a component of the ACL IDE3 . Section 4 discusses the work performed with AllegroCache. Finally, conclusions are presented in Section 5.