Towards Open Corpus Adaptive E-learning Systems on the Web

Development of conceptual knowledge is an important part of education. In individualized instruction this aim can be facilitated by concept maps interconnected with learning materials. Traditional adaptive web-based elearning systems use a closed and static corpus, which is predefined in the design time. But there is plenty of learning resources publicly available on the Web, which provide a huge potential for learners. Obviously, it would be very useful to have an opportunity to choose for a particular context a suitable concept map that could dynamically access selected learning repositories and enable an intuitive navigation in both the concept and document layers, as well as between them. We have attempted to develop a solution that is based on the principles of open corpus adaptive educational hypermedia and at the same time can be part of a personal learning environment. The outcomes show that this may be a promising approach, but its usefulness is highly dependent on the usability and flexibility of the e-learning application.