Adaptive hypermedia system in education: A user model and tracking strategy proposal

New technologies are quickly changing the traditional educational approaches and systems. In fact the integration of new technologies in the field of education offers new challenges and opportunities in distance learning, lifelong learning and e-learning in general. On the other hand e-Learning is an interesting application area for adaptive hypermedia system (AEH). Through the use of user models intelligent tutoring and students tracking techniques an AEH can recognize individual users and their needs adapting in an effective way the student learning path. This paper attempts to enhance student learning by addressing different learning styles by the use of the Adaptive Hypermedia System approach. In particular it addresses to define a standardized and simple user model and some tracking parameters and techniques in order to update the proposed learning path. The proposed system collects information on the user learning style by the use of various well known in literature test We propose a mapping of this acquired information in some parameters defined in standard metadata user description like IMS LIP. The final goal is a student learning style representation by the use of a quantitative model So we can develop a tracking strategy through the observation of the main model parameters. A similar approach could be used for the description of learning objects in order to provide the introduction of well defined metrics for the dynamic tailoring of the learning path to the student´s learning style and needs.