Learning Styles and Instructional Design as Inputs for Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Material Design

In education, instructors adopt different instructional modes that correspond to their preferred teaching style: some focus on principles and others on applications; some present the material in a logical progression of small incremental steps, others proceed from the big picture to the detail and so on. On the other side, students are characterized by different learning styles: preferences or predispositions to behave in a particular way when engaged in a learning process. In the elearning area, adaptive educational hypermedia applications are designed in order to offer personalised learning experience based on the personal learning style. It has been proven that the good match between learning style and instructional design drives to effective learning. This paper proposes a systematic approach for designing leaning tasks for educational hypermedia applications that suit the individual learning style. In particular, we show how the design patterns approach can be used as a design model tool.