An Adaptive Presentation Model for Educational Hypermedia Systems

Authoring tools provide utilities for creating multimedia and hypermedia applications but they neither provide nor enforce efficient presentation models or methodologies. The basic design issues that make the quality and usability of information possible are left up to the developer. We present a three facet adaptive model for development and management of educational hypermedia systems. The model provides: spatial reconfiguration of the hypermedia objects based on activation frequency, information content customization based on author/teacher specified criteria, and hypergraphic network optimization based on usage. This paper presents the theory underlying the model, its architecture and hypermedia structure, its object–oriented content management, and introduces a set of quantitative measures for evaluation of the impact on development effort, as well as study time (the time it takes a student to study the courseware). Our analysis shows improved study time, reduced content skimming, fewer unnecessary hyperspace jumps, and reduction in presentation of irrelevant hypermedia information objects. The above gains in information delivery and content access are traded for increased development effort.