Authoring and Delivery of Adaptive Electronic Textbooks made Easy

The vast majority of textbooks (even when offered on-line) are still traditional book-like static documents with a fixed structure and content. Authoring a textbook in a “simple” environment like Microsoft Word is much easier than using special authoring environments for adaptive electronic textbooks. In this paper we show how to translate a Word-based textbook into an adaptive website that provides adaptive navigation support (through link annotation) as well as adaptive presentation (through conditionally included explanations). The generated adaptive textbook is used through the powerful and highly customizable AHA! adaptive delivery platform. The essence (and novelty) of the presented approach is that the translation from Word (using an extended set of Interbook annotations) to AHA! is performed at the conceptual level. The further translation into (low level rules defining the) adaptive behavior is completely independent from the conceptual structure and content of the textbook (and can also be customized).