Developing Adaptive Elearning : An Authoring Tool Design

Adaptive hypermedia is the answer to the "lost in hyperspace" syndrome, where the user has normally too many links to choose from, and little knowledge about how to proceed and select the most appropriate ones to him/her. Adaptive hypermedia thus offers a selection of links or content most appropriate to the user. Until very recently, little attention has been given to the complex task of authoring materials for Adaptive Educational Hypermedia. An author faces a multitude of problems when creating a personalized, rich learning experience for each user. The purpose of this paper is to present an authoring tool for adaptive hypermedia based courses. Designed to satisfy guidelines of accessibility of the W3C recommendation for authors and learners that present disabilities, the authoring tool allows several authors geographically dispersed to produce such courses together. It consists of a shared workspace gathering all tools necessary to the cooperative development task.