Interactive Design of Adaptive Courses

The ability of educational applications to adapt to individual students has been a sought-after feature for more than a decade. The difficulty of developing this kind of software and the lack of adequate tools that facilitate this endeavor have hindered the participation of instructors and teachers in the elaboration of adaptive applications. In this paper we describe an authoring tool, ATLAS, that aims at combining expressive power and ease of use in the design of adaptive web courses. ATLAS allows the fully interactive construction of courses that adapt automatically to the student’s characteristics and her/his behavior while taking the course. The designer interacts with the tool by using an intuitive visual language based on the direct manipulation of elements involved in the course. The tool takes care of the transition between a teacher’s understanding of the course and the representation model of the underlying