The Learner's Mirror

Adaptive Hypermedia Educational Systems, AHES, represent an emerging technology that provides a unique advantage over traditional Web-based Educational Systems; that is the ability to adapt to the user's needs, goals, preferences etc. These systems are increasingly becoming part of mainstream education, yet there does not exist a disciplined way of designing them most of the development is ad-hoc. This paper aims to fill this void, which is the absence of disciplined design, by recording the expertise of existing Adaptive Hypermedia Educational Systems in the form of design patterns. In this paper we present three of these patterns: User Model Definition, User Model Initialisation and User Model Maintenance, as well as a more complete organization map that illustrates the entire pattern language based on the patterns’ relations.