How to Apply Context-Awareness in an Adaptive e-Learning Environment to Improve Personalization Capabilities?

An e-learning environment is normally used by different types of users, with different needs, profiles and cultures, however, usually it is created and maintained without taking into account these user´s features. In times when web-based system needs to provide support for an ever increasing amount of material and make it available for local-language populations across the world, the introduction of the culture concept in web-based systems (especially e-learning environments) is becoming a necessity, a challenge, and a timely and relevant issue. Indeed, in attempting to disentangle this diversity, culture has received increasing attention in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community, particularly in adaptive system field. This paper details a new approach to user modeling in e-learning, taking into account contextual aspects such as technological, educational, personal and especially cultural context to improve personalization capabilities, making use of a set of ontologies for representing explicitly this rich context as an extension of traditional student modeling, and their incorporation in a actual e-learning system called AdaptWeb (an e-learning system used in some Brazilians universities nowadays).