Creating Adaptive Hyperdocuments for and on the Web

The course “2L690: Hypermedia Structures and Systems” is taught entirely through World Wide Web, and offered at six different universities in the Netherlands and Belgium. Different approaches have been taken towards adding adaptivity to the course text. This paper reviews these development steps and presents the final design, which results in adaptive hyperdocuments that can be written in standard HTML 3.2, possibly by using off the shelf HTML editors. We also present a simple but powerful representation of user (student) knowledge, as used to adapt the link structure and textual contents of the course text.