IJEL 4/3 page layout

Studies have shown that when learning occurs in an environment that uses animated pedagogical agents and personalized instruction, the learner learns the material more deeply and can recall it easier when compared to learning without an agent. Thus, an effective learning system creates personalized contexts for each learner. The “one size fits all” concept is not very effective across a large number of diverse learners. An adaptive instruction approach is more suitable for reaching large diverse groups of learners in electronic learning environments. Adam is an adaptive instruction system that uses animated agents as teachers. It is a web-based system that imparts knowledge using different teaching styles to make understanding concepts easier and personal. An experiment was conducted in which Adam was used to teach C programming concepts in an introductory level C course. The results of this experiment are reported here.