MOT meets AHA!

MOT (My Online Teacher) is an adaptive hypermedia system (AHS) web-authoring environment. MOT is now being further developed according to the LAOS five-layer adaptation model for adaptive hypermedia and adaptive web-material, containing a domain -, goal -, user -, adaptation – and presentation model. The adaptation itself follows the LAG three-layer granularity structure, figuring direct adaptation techniques and rules, an adaptation language and adaptation strategies. In this paper we shortly describe the theoretical basis of MOT, i.e., LAOS and LAG, and then give some information about the current state of MOT. The purpose of this paper is to show how we plan the design and development of MOT and the well-known system AHA! (Adaptive Hypermedia Architecture), developed at the Technical University of Eindhoven since 1996. We aim especially at the integration with AHA! 2.0. Although AHA! 2.0 represents a progress when compared to the previous versions, a lot of adaptive features that are described by the LAOS and the adaptation granulation model and that are being implemented into MOT are not yet (directly) available. So therefore AHA! can benefit from MOT. On the other hand, AHA! offers a running platform for the adaptation engine, which can benefit MOT in return

Adaptive applications to assist students with autism in succeeding in higher education

Abstract. In this demo we discuss a few possible scenarios showing adaptation of presentation and information to assist autistic students in succeeding in higher education. These students not only have specific information need, they are also more concerned about their privacy. We use WiBAF (Within Browser Adaptation Framework) for user modeling and adaptation to give users control over the sharing of their data

WiBAF into a CMS: Personalization in Learning Environments Made Easy

ABSTRACT Adaptivity has proven successful in reducing navigation and comprehension problems in hypermedia documents. Authoring of adaptive hypermedia documents and especially of the adaptivity in these documents has been problematic or at least labour intensive throughout AH history. This paper shows how the integration of a CMS with an adaptive framework greatly simplifies the inclusion of personalization in existing educational applications. It does this within the context of European project Autism&Uni that uses adaptive hypermedia to offer information for students transitioning from high school to university, especially to cater for students on the autism spectrum as well as for non-autistic students. The use of our Within Browser adaptation framework (WiBAF) reduces privacy concerns because the user model is stored on the end-user's machine, and eliminates performance issues that currently prevent the adoption of adaptivity in MOOC platforms by having the adaptation performed on the end-user's machine as well (within the browser). Authoring of adaptive applications within the educational domain with the system proposed was tried out with first year students from the Design-Based Learning Hypermedia course at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) to gather feedback on the problems they faced with the platform

Empirical evaluation of learning styles adaptation language

Typically, the behavior of adaptive systems is specified by a set of rules that are hidden somewhere in the system's implementation. These rules deal with instances of the domain model. The purpose of our approach was to specify the adaptive response of the system at a higher level (able to be applied and reused for different domains or adaptive applications) in an explicit form, that we call an adaptation language. Therefore our intention was to specify this response corresponding to some higher-level user traits (e.g., dealing with generic names instead of instances). To show the support for these higher-level traits we have chosen learning styles (LS) as an implementation field. We defined an XML-based adaptation language LAG-XLS for the AHA! (Adaptive Hypermedia Architecture) system. In this paper we will briefly present LAGXLS and then focus on empirical evaluation of this novel methodology – thereby alleviating one of the problematic issues in adaptive hypermedia (AH) and AH authoring: the lack of empirical analysis

Authoring of learning styles in adaptive hypermedia : problems and solutions

Learning styles, as well as the best ways of responding with corresponding instructional strategies, have been intensively studied in the classical educational (classroom) setting. There is much less research of application of learning styles in the new educational space, created by the Web. Moreover, authoring applications are scarce, and they do not provide explicit choices and creation of instructional strategies for specific learning styles. The main objective of the research described in this paper is to provide the authors with a tool which will allow them to incorporate different learning styles in their adaptive educational hypermedia applications. In this way, we are creating a semantically significant interface between classical learning styles and instructional strategies and the modern field of adaptive educational hypermedia

Authoring of Learning Styles in Adaptive Hypermedia: Problems and Solutions

Learning styles, as well as the best ways of responding with corresponding instructional strategies, have been intensively studied in the classical educational (classroom) setting. There is much less research of application of learning styles in the new educational space, created by the Web. Moreover, authoring applications are scarce, and they do not provide explicit choices and creation of instructional strategies for specific learning styles. The main objective of the research described in this paper is to provide the authors with a tool which will allow them to incorporate different learning styles in their adaptive educational hypermedia applications. In this way, we are creating a semantically significant interface between classical learning styles and instructional strategies and the modern field of adaptive educational hypermedia

Building Adaptive Presentations with AHA! 2.0

An increasing number of Website developers try to provide some kind of "personalization". In this paper we show how the designers (called "authors" in this paper) can build their adaptive presentations using the AHA! system (for Adaptive Hypermedia Architecture). Most existing Adaptive Hypermedia Systems are special-purpose, aimed at one specific application or application area (mostly educational applications). AHA! also started out as an educational system but now it is being turned into a general-purpose tool through a grant from the NLnet Foundation. AHA! aims at bringing adaptivity to a wide variety of applications such as on-line information systems, on-line help systems, museum and shopping websites, in addition to the area of on-line textbooks. In this paper we first present the overall architecture of the system. Then, we describe the main steps of the authoring process. In this part we present two new authoring interfaces which support the author in defining the domain/adaptation model. Finally, w

INTERMEDIATE PLATFORM

This paper deals with a new challenge in Adaptive Hypermedia and Web-based systems: finding the perfect adaptation language to express, independently from the domain model, the intelligent, adaptive behaviour of personalized Web courseware. The major requirements for the ideal language are: reuse, flexibility, high level semantics, and ease of use. To draw closer to this ideal language, we compare two such language proposals: LAG, a generic adaptation language, and a new XML adaptation language for learning styles in AHA!, LAG-XLS