WiBAF into a CMS: Personalization in Learning Environments Made Easy

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.