Social Adaptive Navigation Support for Open-Corpus E- Learning

Adaptive hypermedia is an alternative approach to the traditional approach "one size fits all". Adaptive Navigation Support (ANS) is one of the adaptation techniques used to help users find their way in hyperspace. ANS has created interesting opportunities in e-learning applications to address users with different learning goals and different knowledge level. However, adaptive hypermedia techniques are well designed for closed-corpus that could be manually tagged by an expert and are not easily applicable in an open-corpus such as collection of online resources. In this paper, we are presenting a new approach for supporting ANS through social navigation and footprint of other users in an educational application. The new approach is called Social Adaptive Navigation Support (SANS). We have developed a C programming tutorial called KnowledgeSea that supports SANS. We have evaluated KnowledgeSea with two semesters of classroom studies. The result of studies supports the idea of SANS and suggests more powerful navigation support for future work.