Adaptive educational hypermedia systems in technology enhanced learning

Traditional online learning environments generally use a one-size-fits-all approach, neglecting individual learner needs, goals, and cognitive abilities. Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) systems emerged to address this by personalizing learning content based on user profiles. The Adaptive Learning System is a computerized system developed to enhance digital interactive educational content teaching and learning. The system’s Adaptive algorithm automatically detects learners’ strengths and weaknesses through the adaptation process and provides personalized learning materials, feedback, and guidance during their learning. Adaptive content allows learners to learn the material at their own pace while providing additional support, evaluation, and resources tailored to each learner. In traditional educational systems, every student is given access to the same learning content regardless of their individual learning needs. Higher education institutions face various challenges when testing and implementing adaptive learning systems for their domain of knowledge. Issues related to technical challenges include processing real-time data, difficulties consolidating learning concepts and solutions into existing learning management systems, and the complexity, ease of use, and usability of adaptive learning systems. However, despite the advancement and technical sophistication in adaptive algorithms, most AEH systems still face significant usability challenges. Learners often struggle with complex interfaces, limited system responsiveness, and poor adaptation to diverse demographics and subject backgrounds. Consequently, the current adaptive systems are underutilized in higher education, with limited empirical evidence on their effectiveness in enhancing student engagement, engagement, quality of experience (QoE), and academic performance. While foundational research work (Brusilovsky, 2001; De Bra et al., 2013) and recent studies (Liu & Lim, 2020; colMOOC project) have shown the importance of adaptive educational hypermedia, yet ongoing issues persist regarding usability, learner control (Paramythis & Loidl-Reisinger, 2004), and empirical validation across varied higher education settings (Latham et al., 2004; Educause, 2018). Systematic investigations into user-controllable personalization and its effects on inclusivity and academic achievement remain limited (Xie et al., 2019; Lundqvist; Warburton, 2019). Furthermore, Li et al. (2021) highlighted that existing systems lack comprehensive cognitive modelling and fail to adequately adapt to individual learner dispositions, which restricts their intelligence and adaptability. This complexity in adaptive systems continues to pose challenges for education overall, as emphasized by Fengying Li, Yifeng He, and Qingshui Xue (2021). Addressing these issues, Dubiel et al. (2022) propose a framework for adaptive user interfaces that integrates the interaction environment to enhance system responsiveness. Therefore, there remains a significant gap in the literature regarding the lack of empirical evaluation of user-controlled personalization, particularly in real-world, multi-disciplinary higher education contexts. Existing research has focused mainly on adaptive algorithmic and technical development, but has not given sufficient attention to practical usability (the lack of effective, usable AEH systems, learner diversity, and actual learner-centered outcomes). Moreover, there is a lack of comprehensive frameworks for evaluating the usability of adaptive educational hypermedia (AEH), and there is limited research on how these adaptive systems can foster inclusivity and fairness among diverse learner populations. Therefore, there is an urgent need to address the usability and complexity problems in AEH systems and to suggest the creation of usable, effective, personalised, learner-centric, and user-controllable AEH systems for higher education environments. This research study addresses these gaps by introducing a personalized, user-controllable Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) framework specially designed for a Higher Education setting. It evaluates multiple versions of adaptive learning systems across multiple disciplines (English, Malay, Computer Science) revealing significant enhancements in both student achievement and satisfaction. The study not only evaluates multiple versions of adaptive systems but also offers practical recommendations for software developers and educators seeking to implement effective, more intuitive, and learner-centric adaptive systems within real higher educational environments. By exploring the relationships between learner demographics, usability, and academic outcomes, the study promotes inclusivity and equity in digital education. More specifically, it introduces a novel user-controllable personalization feature that empowers learners to customize the learning content to improve their adaptive learning experience, addressing a major limitation found in existing systems. The findings demonstrate significant improvements in student performance and satisfaction with the system’s interface, thereby enhancing subject retention, confirming that adaptive learning systems can effectively improve the academic experience in higher education environments.

E-learning systems have rapidly evolved from generation to another throughout the recent years. Adaptive Educational Hypermedia System (AEHS) provides capabilities to personalize the web-based system according to student's model such as user's interests, needs, preferences, knowledge, and background, which are personal characteristics gathered explicitly or implicitly. The goal of developing AEHS is to achieve an effective and affective learning performance, as well as to get positive impacts on the student through gaining skills and learning experiences. Most AEHS are technologically-driven to transfer knowledge rather than pedagogically-driven focusing on gaining cognitive skills and other experiences. To overcome this gap many researchers considered Cognitive style (CS) as the most important factor for reasoning and predicting individual traits, learning strategies and other preferences. Furthermore many researchers proposed new cognitive factors- rational, intuitive, and interpersonal as the most innate, brain-based, fixed stable preferences to build a robust adaptive student model dynamically and to get positive influence on the affective and effective AEHS. Based on the literature review, we have identified a number of theoretical and technical issues related to the AEHS architecture in relation to the whole brain cognitive style model to achieve an effective learning outcomes. The findings will be used for designing a user model for AEHS.

The purpose of adaptive educational hypermedia systems (AEHS) is to provide each learner with learning experiences that have been specially tailored to their specific learning requirements. While the concept of AEHS appears promising, AEHS are very complex systems to design and develop. This chapter reviews a few of the challenges encountered in the design and development of these complex systems and some of the challenges encountered by educators who propose to use AEHS with their students. A number of the skills required by educators to develop positive learning experiences are discussed. In order to successfully use AEHS, educators must decide on what student characteristics to base the adaptive elements of the course. Educators may feel challenged to show the impact that AEHS can have on the learning experience. Educators may have a dilemma in deciding to allow or not to allow (1) student access to their user model and (2) students to edit their user model. Further research is required to explore why AEHS have not yet impacted education as initially expected.

As intelligent systems demand for human–automation interaction increases, the need for learners’ cognitive traits adaptation in adaptive educational hypermedia systems (AEHS) has dramatically increased. AEHS utilize learners’ cognitive processes to attain fair human–automation interaction for their adaptive processes. However, obtaining accurate cognitive trait for the AEHS adaptation process has been a challenge due to the fact that it is difficult to determine what extent such traits can comprehend system functionalities. Hence, this study has explored correlation among learners’ pupil size dilation, learners’ reading time and endogenous blinking rate when using AEHS so as to enable cognitive load estimation in support of AEHS adaptive process. An eye-tracking sensor was used and the study found correlation among learners’ pupil size dilation, reading time and learners’ endogenous blinking rate. Thus, the results show that endogenous blinking rate, pupil size and reading time are not only AEHS reliable parameters for cognitive load measurement but can also support human–automation interaction at large.

Adaptive content selection is recognized as a challenging research issue in adaptive educational hypermedia systems (AEHS). Several efforts have been reported in literature aiming to support the Adaptation Model (AM) design by providing AEHS designers with either guidance for the direct definition of adaptation rules, or semi-automated mechanisms which generate the AM via the implicit definition of such rules. The goal of the semi-automated, decision-based approaches is to generate a continuous decision function that estimates the desired AEHS response, aiming to overcome the insufficiency and/or inconsistency problems of the defined adaptation rule sets. Although such approaches bare the potential to provide efficient AMs, they still miss a commonly accepted framework for evaluating their performance. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework suitable for validating the performance decision-based approaches in adaptive learning objects selection in AEHS and demonstrate the use of this framework in the case of our proposed decision-based approach for estimating the desired AEHS response.

Computer-based educational systems are becoming increasingly important in all levels and types of education. Intelligent Educational Systems (IESs) are computer-based educational systems encompassing Artificial Intelligence schemes to increase the effectiveness of the learning process. In this paper, we survey patents regarding IESs. As IESs we consider either Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) or Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems (AEHSs) incorporating intelligent techniques. We first present indicative functions implemented in the three basic components of an IES: the domain knowledge, the user (or student) modeling unit and the pedagogical module. Afterwards, we focus on representative patents concerning IESs and present the corresponding work. At the end, we outline current and future developments regarding IESs. Keywords: Intelligent tutoring systems, adaptive educational hypermedia systems, intelligent educational systems, artificial intelligence in education, intelligent E-learning systems, intelligent computer-based training systems, artificial intelligence in Elearning

This paper proposes a new approach to automatic retrieval and composition of Learning Objects (LOs) in an Adaptive Educational Hypermedia System (AEHS) using multidimensional learner characteristics to enhance learning effectiveness. The approach focuses on adaptive techniques in four components of AEHS: Learning Paths, LO Retrieval, LO Sequencing, and Examination Difficulty Levels. This approach has been designed to enable the adaptation of rules to become generic. Hence, the application to various domains is possible. The approach dynamically selects, sequences, and composes LOs into an individual learning package based on the use of domain ontology, learner profiles, and LO metadata. The Sharable Content Object Reference Model is employed to represent LO metadata and learning packages in order to support LO sharing. The IMS Learner Information Package Specification is used to represent learner profiles. A preliminary evaluation of the developed system indicates the system’s effectiveness in terms of learners’ satisfaction.

Most of the suggested reference models for Adaptive Hypermedia (AH) systems lack the capability to share their user models. The present paper proposes a reference model having two user models in AH systems – an integral one with domain dependent characteristics and another 'Shared User Model'(SUM) with domain independent characteristics. For adaptation purposes, adaptation rules for SUM are stored in 'Shared Adaptation Model' (SAM). Both SUM and SAM together form the 'Shared Module'(SM) that is common among AH systems thus providing the benefits of initialising and updating them with most recent user information, and also enforcing sort of standardisation among them.

The support of diversity is a growing concern in public secondary schools in Spain. Adaptive Educational Hypermedia (AEH) technology provides tools well fitted for this task. Through three different experiences, this paper shows how AEH helps to improve student performance. However, the complexity of the design process for adaptive hypermedia is hindering a wider application of this technology. One possible solution is to apply the benefits of adaptive hypermedia to provide support to adaptive-course authors. In this way, teachers with no knowledge of adaptive systems, user models or formal languages would be able to produce rather complex adaptive courses, starting from course templates automatically selected according to their specific needs. In this paper it is also shown how an adaptive course on adaptive hypermedia design was used to help secondary school teachers to select and instantiate these templates.

This chapter describes an approach to the development of an adaptive hypermedia Web-based educational system and presents the model of an AHyCo (adaptive hypermedia courseware) system. An adaptive educational system should contain not only the learning environment for students, but also the authoring environment for teachers. A user friendly authoring module should be the integral part of such a system. The authoring of adaptive hypermedia consists of the development of actual hypermedia content (lessons, tests, etc.) together with the definition of the rules for adaptation. The authoring component of an AHyCo system, described inthis chapter, includes both. By utilizing intuitive form-based user interface, it enables teachers from areas other than IT to produce and interconnect complex hypermedia content.

Adaptive hypermedia system stores information about particular user and according to this information, it adapts its output in accord to this user information. This paper focuses on general reusability of user data in adaptive hypermedia system which are used as an input of the adaptation process. This proposal is based on the mapping language, which maps user parameters (atomic parts of user information in adaptive hypermedia system) between the systems. The essential point of this proposal is, that the proposed integration is done by the external way (by definition of the mapping and external data pump), thus any changes in existing adaptive hypermedia systems are not necessary.

Accommodating learning styles in adaptive educational hypermedia systems (AEHS) improves students' learning performance in web-based learning. Hence, in implementing the systems, the students' learning style identification process is important. Most of today's AEHS rely on a traditional technique of identifying students' learning styles, which is using questionnaires. However, using questionnaires for this purpose is less efficient, cumbersome and may not be that feasible. This study proposes a real-time learning style identification technique by recording students' browsing behaviors and analyzing them by using multi-layer feed forward artificial neural network (MLFF). The result suggests that there is a relationship between the frequencies of students' click on learning components with their staying time on those components. It also indicates that the proposed identification technique performs well in identifying students' learning styles.

In the last years the development of learning environments, and particularly of Educational Adaptive Hypermedia (EAH) systems has increased significantly. However, it is important to complement this development with evaluation methods in order to improve EAH system performance. In this context, we propose to analyze the data from student interaction with EAH systems utilizing the GeSES method. This method has been specifically designed to work with student logs and is based on C4.5 rules. In particular, the work described in this paper aims to achieve the following two objectives: testing the method with different types of data in order to find out its reliability, and detecting symptoms of low performance in a specific adaptive learning environment, called CoMoLE.

This paper describes the interactive problem solving support offered by our adaptive educational hypermedia system called MATHEMA. The general goal of the MATHEMA is the support of senior high school students or the beginners of higher education, through an interactive and constructivist environment, in learning physics (electromagnetism) individually and/or collaboratively, and to overcome their possible misconceptions and learning difficulties. Initially, a review of related work about the implemented AEHS/ITS and the didactic design principles of the MATHEMA are presented. Through the interactive problem solving, the system supports the students in solving electromagnetism problems, individually and/or collaboratively, by following an activity that is based on the experimentation with simulations, explorations, guided discovery, and collaboration didactic approaches. An experimental study with senior high school students showed that they improve their performances when following this activity. A questionnaire that we gave to the students to express their opinion about our system helped us to improve the quality of the courses.

Many techniques have been developed to enhance learning experience with computer technology. A particularly great influence of technology on learning came with the emergence of the web and adaptive educational hypermedia systems. While the web enables users to interact and collaborate with each other to create, organize, and share knowledge via user-generated content, majority of e-learning systems do not utilize the power of their users to create high quality educational content and provide data for adaptive algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a novel social learning framework that allows anybody to author educational content in a form of mini-lessons, learn lessons by following adaptive learning pathways as well as interact with their peers as in any social network. The proposed approach combines concepts of crowd-sourcing, online social networks, and complex adaptive systems to engage users in efficient learning through teaching process. We first describe the main idea behind the framework and how users interact with it, and then we describe SALT system that implements the framework. We also performed evaluation of the SALT system via several classroom studies. Our results show that collective learning experiences can be efficiently utilized in adaptive social learning. We found that students tend to form stable clusters that survive very high similarity threshold. Meanwhile, our learning pathway analysis showed that almost all students have their own unique best pathway. Experiments with various recommendation algorithms showed that most algorithms obtain very small penalty in all classes.