An adaptive educationnal hypermedia system integrating learning styles: Model and experiment

In the past decade, a number of adaptive hypermedia learning systems have been developed. However, most of these systems tailor presentation content and navigational support solely according to students´ prior knowledge. On the other hand, previous research suggested that learning styles significantly affect student learning because they refer to how learners process and organize information. To this end, this paper presents an approach to integrate learning styles into adaptive e-learning hypermedia. The main objectives were to develop a Learning Style based Adaptive E-learning Hypermedia System (LS-AEHS) and assess the effect of adapting educational materials individualized to the student´s learning style. In this work, our main goal aims to adopting the theory of experiential learning in the context of the DAVID KOLB´s model to pass of this learning style model to define the adaptation rules in order to adapt the learning content and the navigation to each learning style in KOLB model. To achieve the main objectives, a case study was developed. An experimental evaluation was designed to evaluate the new approach of matching learning materials with learning styles and their influence on student´s learning achievement. The findings support the use of learning styles as guideline for adaptation into the adaptive e-learning hypermedia systems.