Is Semi-Automatic Authoring of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Possible?

Alexandra Cristea

Keywords

Adaptive educational hypermedia (AEH), authoring of adaptive educational hypermedia, design patterns, adaptive patterns

Abstract

Adaptive educational hypermedia (AEH) is considered, in principle, superior to regular hypermedia because it allows personalization and customization. However, the creation of good-quality AEH is not trivial. Nowadays, a lot of research concentrates on the authoring challenge in adaptive hypermedia. The author previously introduced the Layered AHS Authoring-Model and Operators (LAOS) model, a five-layer adaptive hypermedia authoring model that describes AEH in a detailed way, to allow flexible recomposition of its elements, according to the personalization requirements. However, such a detailed structure claims a lot of time to populate with AEH instances. Alternatively, this work proposes semi-automatic authoring techniques that populate the whole structure based on a small initial subset that has actually been authored by a human. The author analyzes the different possible initial subsets, and the resulting structures, based on the LAOS architecture, as well as examining whether the flexibility of the whole was in any way affected by the replacement of human authoring with automatic authoring. The latter is seen as yet another step towards adaptive hypermedia that “writes itself".

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