An Adaptive Hypermedia System

Hypermedia systems are information tools that allow flexible navigation through several topics. This approach is being increasingly used in educational environments. However, these systems have disadvantages: if the hyperspace is big enough (and usually it is), the users become overwhelmed by the amount of paths and topics available, and get lost in the hyperspace losing even the benefits of linear information documents. This is specially negative in education. We have joined the advantages of Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Hypermedia Systems to build HyperTutor, a hypermedia system that adapts the hyperspace available depending on the student knowledge. As long as the student acquires concepts, the hyperspace accessibility grows giving the opportunity to reach new parts of it. The system is structured in two parts: the Hypermedia Component that provides the flexibility of hypermedia features; and the Tutor Component that has knowledge about the nodes that can be presented, and maintains a user model for each student. These data are used to tailor the hyperspace nodes to be presented to the student adding intelligent adaptive behavior to the system.