Adaptive Patterns in Authoring of Educational Adaptive Hypermedia

One of the main problems with e-learning environments is their lack of personalization (or adaptivity). They cannot offer customisation for the student; they can only offer identical contents to all the consumers. Educational Adaptive Hypermedia (EAH) environments should be the answer to this problem. Adaptive Hypermedia is a relatively new field (starting around the early 1990s), but it already has reached some maturity and already features some good applications. Imagine, for instance, that, instead of showing all students an example of a painting by Rembrandt and then show them the description of the chiaroscuro technique, one could write a rule: IF student. chiaroscuroTechnique.motivation='non-existent' THEN show.paintingRembrandt; Show.chiaroscuroTechnique; So, show the painting only to students without motivation in studying the chiaroscuro technique (with the hope that seeing such a great painting will motivate them), and skip this step if the motivation is already there (give direct information for motivated students). This very simple rule already offers some customisation, dependent on a student model variable called 'motivation'. At the Eindhoven University of Technology, for instance, a few courses are given already for a couple of years on-line, in adaptive hypermedia environments (featuring student models and automatic adaptation to student's computed 'knowledge level': However, such EAH environments are not yet as spread as we would have expected, and not many educators even know about the opportunities offered by such automatic personalization, let alone make use of it. The major drawback that we have found is that, at present, there are no good authoring tools for educational adaptive hypermedia, and creating EAHs from scratch without such tools becomes actually a programmer's job – and not that of an author (e.g., teacher). Therefore, we embarked on the quest of designing appropriate authoring tools for EAHs. Please note that such authoring tools as we envision do not try to compete with commercial tools such as Blackboard, WebCT, etc. What we want is to complement these tools with what they lack: the possibility of expressing the automatic personalization elements for the student. Please also note that such authoring is normally more difficult than authoring of a sequential course: alternatives have to be designed, linked and annotated (i.e., the static descriptions). The rules of when and how to take the alternative routes have to be specified (i.e., the dynamics description). or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not …