The role of epistemology in instructional design

The Generic Tutoring Environment (GTE) is an authoring environment for the development of courseware. Claims with regard to GTE's epistemological foundations are analyzed and explored. GTE's assumptions are thereby shown to reveal a somewhat reductionist bias, which is to say that GTE has placed emphasis on computational approaches to instructional modeling. Nevertheless, pragmatic concerns with regard to GTE's utility and effectiveness are of interest to the developers and to other researchers in the fields of courseware design and instructional modeling. In general, GTE is seen to be both ambitious and powerful. While GTE does not truly provide an epistemology of instructional design, it does provide a powerful framework within which effective tutors can be efficiently generated.