Self-Regulation Strategies and Technologies for Adaptive Learning Management Systems for Web-based Instruction

The current study identify the potential problems of current web-based instruction and learning management systems in terms of its lack of flexibility and customization required for individual learners’ different goals, backgrounds, knowledge levels, and learning capabilities. Advanced adaptive learning management system technologies are able to give possible solutions and mechanisms for adaptively foreseeing, monitoring, organization, and evaluating individual learners within learning management systems. According to Brusilovsky and Vassileva (2003)’s suggestions, the authors are introducing the examples of adaptive system mechanisms for adaptive self-regulation can be such as Glossary, Indexed Textbooks, Advanced Navigation, Direct Guidance and Adaptive Navigation Support, Adaptive Guidance for Prerequisite-based Help, for large scale of web-based learning management systems. Introduction A lot of organizations, nowadays, implement Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Learning Content Management System (LCMS) to manage, track, and quantify all of learning activities and resources in an institution to meet the individual and organizational needs as one of the effective advanced learning technology. There are some of well-known learning management systems particularly developed for university such as WebCT (Goldberg, Salari & Swoboda, 1996), Virtual-U (Harasim, Calvert & Groenboer, 1997), FLAX (Routn, Graves & Ryan, 1997), TopClass (WBT Systems, 1997) and Learning Space (Lotus, 1997). They are also commercially available for corporate and government settings as well. Some organizations, moreover, invest fortunes to build their own LMS/LCMS since they realize the inevitable needs of managing, reusing, and utilizing their valuable electronic assets including knowledge, information, and resources. Is LMS/LCMS valuable enough for organizations to invest considerable budget for it? LMS/LCMS can be defined as electronic management systems, which enable to design, review, converse, store, maintain, analyze, and upgrade electronic content. There can be more creative processes of dealing with electronic content depending on the users requests. Then, what is electronic content? The formats and modes of electronic content can have various shapes and modes. It can be web pages having various elements such as text, graphics, controls, multimedia, and etc. At the same time, it can be various applications, database, various types of files, programming logic or naming conventions. In order to make the electronic assets available for being used for authentic problem solving, the learners should go through a series of complicated processes within LMS/LCMS. When we think about the whole process and resources of LMS/LCMS in terms of human learning and performance aspects, it involves complicated steps of incorporating the abundant resources into authentic problem solving. That is to say, the learners need the techniques and strategies to use them uniquely for their knowledge construction, task completion, and performance improvement. Otherwise, the fortunes of investment for LMS/LCMS cannot give the expected return on investment for their organization. Learners are likely to face with potential problems of managing the breadth and depth of electronic resources, driving them as they planned, incorporating them into their performance, and optimizing them for their workplace. Current Learning Management Systems The adaptive features of LMS/LCMS become more necessary since the learners visit their LMS/LCM S to meet their own unique needs based on their current readiness. Individual learners have their own experience, knowledge and skills, as well as cognitive abilities, personality traits, learning styles, interests, and motivation before they approach the electronic contents in LMS/LCMS. The main difficulties of learning management systems