Patterns for Adaptive Web-based Educational Systems

Adaptive Web-based Educational Systems are sophisticated applications that offer a solution to the shortcomings of their non-adaptive counterparts, attempting to provide individualized and customized learning, tailored to the learner’s needs. Even though substantial research and development of such systems has taken place the past years, they are still designed and developed from scratch. The reason is that experience from designing previous Adaptive Web-based Educational Systems is not somehow documented, thus resulting in the development teams ‘re-inventing the wheel’. This paper introduces an approach for recording design experience in the form of design patterns for Adaptive Web-based Educational Systems, which are semantically organized and categorized, according to a well-established reference model for adaptive hypermedia applications. Furthermore, this paper elaborates on the patterns of one of the above categories that deal with the user modeling aspect of such systems. Author