Community-oriented Course Authoring to Support Topic-based Student Modeling

Content authoring is an important part of adaptive educational system development process. The success of the large-scale transfer of these systems to the real classrooms highly depends on how actively classroom teachers will be involved in the content authoring. This paper suggests an approach to the adaptive content authoring based on the coarse-grained topics. While providing sufficient adaptation to student knowledge topics do not put an additional authoring burden on the classroom teachers. The utilization of common metadata standards and application of semantic web technologies for knowledge description facilitates the sharing and reuse of created models and enables reasoning both within a single model and across related models. On the interface level topic sharing and reuse is supported by the community-oriented learning portal. The learning portal communicates with the user modeling server, which employs newly created topic-based course structures as the basis for automatic overlay student modeling and adaptation to student knowledge.