Integrating learning styles and adaptive e-learning system: Current developments, problems and opportunities

Learning styles which refer to students’ preferred ways to learn can play an important role in adaptive e-learning systems. With the knowledge of different styles, the system can offer valuable advice and instructions to students and teachers to optimise students’ learning process. Moreover, e-leaning system which allows computerised and statistical algorithms opens the opportunity to overcome drawbacks of the traditional detection method that uses mainly questionnaire. These appealing reasons have led to a growing number of researches looking into the integration of learning styles and adaptive learning system. This paper, by reviewing 51 studies, delves deeply into different parts of the integration process. It captures a variety of aspects from learning styles theories selection in e-learning environment, online learning styles predictors, automatic learning styles classification to numerous learning styles applications. The results offer insights into different developments, achievements and open problems in the field. Based on these findings, the paper also provides discussion, recommendations and guidelines for future researches. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.