Information Technology Reference
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approaches, AH is a comparatively new approach that accounts for the
hypermedia and user modeling fields together [10,11]. AH has always been
applied in education. A number of non-Web-based stand-alone adaptive
educational hypermedia systems were built between 1990 and 1996; with
the early Web-based Adaptive and Intelligent Educational Systems (AIES)
using AH technologies [14,21]. Since then the Web has become the primary
platform for developing educational AH systems.
AH systems apply different forms of user models to adapt the content as
well as the links of the hypermedia pages to the user. Brusilovsky further
mentioned that AH is a field positioned on the crossroads of hypermedia and
user modeling. Thus, “what can be adapted in terms of the content or struc-
ture of hypermedia” can be another considerable task. Brusilovsky also sum-
marized the taxonomy of available AH methods today. As partially shown
in Figure 17.1, two major technologies are identified: adaptive presentation
and adaptive navigation support. The main purpose of all of these adaptive
methods is to support users' performance on a particular task like “how to
learn a topic.”
The primary aim of the adaptive presentation technology is to adapt
hypermedia page content based on the student's goals and knowledge as
well as other information stored in the user model. Examples are ELM-ART
[14], AST [50], and InterBook [13]. Instead, adaptive navigation support tech-
nology, by changing the appearance of visible links, supports the student
in hyperspace orientation and navigation. Two well-known examples are
ISIS-Tutor [12] and Hypadapter [27]. Direct guidance, adaptive link annota-
tion, and adaptive link hiding are the three ways that are most popular in
Web-based AIES and some of these features are also quite similar to ITS
Adaptive multimedia presentation
Adaptive
presentation
Adaptive test presentation
Adaptation of modality
Adaptive
hypermedia
technologies
Direct guidance
Adaptive link Sorting
Adaptive link Hiding
Adaptive link generation
Map annotation
Adaptive
navigation
support
Figure 17.1
Brusilovsky's taxonomy of AH technologies.
