Learning Activities and Aids in Adaptive Learning Environments

The Internet offers distance education an opportunity to augment the traditional methods, content and strategies of teaching and learning yielding to the development of innovative learning environments. In this paper we concentrate on the design of learning activities and aids in adaptive learning environments. In particular, we present learning activities and aids that reflect two alternative pedagogical design approaches of adaptive educational hypermedia systems. The first concentrates on the instructional design approach which focuses on the definition of specific outcome objectives, design of materials and procedures that are targeted on these objectives, and assessments that determine if learners have attained the desired objectives – adopted by the main stream of adaptive educational hypermedia systems, and the constructivist approach which focuses on in-context learning organized around authentic tasks. As representative examples of learning activities and aids designed on these approaches, we present learners’ interaction with INSPIRE, which adopts an instructional framework that combines theories from the area of instructional design and learning styles, and ProSys which adopts a constructivist approach based on a combination of project-based and case-based learning theories. In particular, learners working with INSPIRE are progressively provided with structured content in a sequence that matches learners’ knowledge level and progress, as well as individualised study guidelines based on learner’s knowledge level and learning style. In the case of ProSys, learners work on projects, and the system proposes them a learning cycle to follow as well as individualised content and resources in the form of realistic cases in order to support learners deal with different perspectives of the project.