Adaptive hypermedia for education and training

Adaptive hypermedia (AH) is an alternative to the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach in the development of hypermedia systems. AH systems build a model of the goals, preferences, and knowledge of each individual user; this model is used throughout the interaction with the user to adapt to the needs of that particular user (Brusilovsky, 1996b). For example, a student in an adaptive educational hypermedia system will be given a presentation that is adapted specifically to his or her knowledge of the subject (De Bra & Calvi, 1998; Hothi, Hall, & Sly, 2000) as well as a suggested set of the most relevant links to proceed further (Brusilovsky, Eklund, & Schwarz, 1998; Kavcic, 2004). An adaptive electronic encyclopedia will personalize the content of an article to augment the user's existing knowledge and interests (Bontcheva & Wilks, 2005; Milosavljevic, 1997). A museum guide will adapt the presentation about every visited object to the user's individual path through the museum (Oberlander et al., 1998; Stock et al., 2007). Adaptive hypermedia belongs to the class of user-adaptive systems (Schneider-Hufschmidt, Kühme, & Malinowski, 1993). A distinctive feature of an adaptive system is an explicit user model that represents user knowledge, goals, and interests, as well as other features that enable the system to adapt to different users with their own specific set of goals. An adaptive system collects data for the user model from various sources that can include implicitly observing user interaction and explicitly requesting direct input from the user. The user model is applied to provide an adaptation effect, that is, tailor interaction to different users in the same context. In different kinds of adaptive systems, adaptation effects could vary greatly. In AH systems, it is limited to three major adaptation technologies: adaptive content selection, adaptive navigation support, and adaptive presentation. The first of these three technologies comes from the fields of adaptive information retrieval (IR) and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). When the user searches for information, the system adaptively selects and prioritizes the most relevant items (Brajnik, Guida, & Tasso, 1987; Brusilovsky, 1992b)

Modélisation probabiliste du style d'apprentissage et application à l'adaptation de contenus pédagogiques indexés par une ontologie

Cette thèse s'inscrit dans le cadre général des systèmes d'enseignement adaptatifs. La problématique traitée est l'adaptation de l'activité pédagogique au mode d'apprentissage préféré de l'élève. Les travaux réalisés ont eu pour objectifs de : modéliser les préférences d'apprentissage de l'élève ; modéliser les contenus pédagogiques du domaine à enseigner ; proposer une stratégie d'adaptation qui rapproche les préférences des contenus afin de proposer une méthode pédagogique appropriée. Pour atteindre le premier objectif, la thèse étudie le style d'apprentissage de Felder. Une étude empirique pour établir un modèle de dépendance entre style, pédagogie, et comportement de l'élève a été réalisée. Les résultats ont permis d'établir un modèle de préférences probabiliste. Une méthode en deux étapes pour apprendre ce odèle puis le renforcer est développée. Deux implantations sont proposées : un réseau bayésien et une machine à vecteurs de support. Le contenu quant à lui est modélisé en utilisant une ontologie combinant le domaine, la pédagogie, ainsi que les ressources physiques. Une stratégie d'adaptation structurée sur quatre dimensions est présentée. Celle-ci consiste à rechercher dans le contenu la séquence pédagogique sémantiquement pertinente pour les préférences de l'élève. La recherche s'appuie sur une mesure de similarité sémantique qui est établie. Ce travail a eu un impact sur deux projets européens. En effet, la méthode de production et structuration des contenus, basée sur SCORM, qui est proposée a servi pour le projet UP2UML. L'approche de modélisation de l'élève sert aux recherches sur le profilage dans le projet KPLAB. ABSTRACT : This thesis deals with adaptive teaching systems. The research question is how to adapt pedagogical activities to the prefered learning mode of a student. The scientific objectives are: modelisation of student's learning preferences ; modelisation of adaptive learning contents of a given domain ; establishing an adaptation strategy that maps preferences to contents in order to recommend an appropriate teaching method In order to reach the first objective, the thesis studies the learning style of Felder. An empirical study to derive a dependency model between the style, the pedagogy, and the student behaviour has been conducted. Results led to creating a probabilistic preference model. A two-stage method to learn and reinforce the model is developed. Two implementations are proposed: a bayesian network and an SVM classifier. The content is represented using an ontology that combines the domain, the pedagogy, and the physical resources. An adaptation strategy centered around four dimensions is presented. This consists of searching the content to retrieve the most semantically pertinent pedagogical sequence given the student preferences. The search implements an original semantic similarity measure. This work significantly impacted two European research projects. The production and structuration method designed in this thesis and based on SCORM has been applied in the Leonardo Da Vinci project called UP2UML. The student modeling approche serves currently our research on user profiling in the KPLAB projec

Reusability in GEAHS

International audienceGEAHS (Generic Educational Adaptive Hypermedia System) is a platform designed to ease the development of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia, using standard formalisms. In this document, we explain the underlying principles of this platform. Genericity is achieved thanks to an adaptation engine based on situation calculus and RDF. This paper describes the main aspects of our system, as well as the use we make of situation calculus to create a more reusable adaptive hypermedia system