This document reports the work done during the initial two months of 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 agents1 for use in e-learning courses. ASPIRE will support the process of developing intelligent educational agents by automating the tasks involved, thus making it possible for tertiary teachers with little computer background to develop systems for their courses. In addition, we will develop several intelligent agents using the authoring system, so that we can evaluate its effectiveness and efficiency. The resulting e-learning courses 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 e-learning. In this first report on the ASPIRE project, we start by presenting the background for the project, and then describe our previous work. Section 1.2 presents the basic features of constraint-based tutors, while Section 1.3 presents WETAS, a prototype of a tutoring shell. ASPIRE will be based on these foundations. The first project milestone is the architecture of ASPIRE, which is discussed in Section 2. We first present the overall architecture of ASPIRE, and then turn to details of ASPIRE-Tutor, the tutoring server, followed by a similar discussion of ASPIRE-Author, the authoring server. Section 3 presents the data model and discusses individual classes. We then present the functionality of the system in terms of user stories in Section 4. Section 5 presents the results of the second project milestone – designing the knowledge representation language used to generate domain models. The third milestone, the Session Manager, is presented in the last section.