Adaptive Hypermedia for eLearning: An Implementation Framework

eLearning can be defined as an approach to teaching and teaming that utilises Internet technologies to communicate and collaborate in an educational context. This includes technology that supplements traditional classroom training with web-based components and learning environments where the educational process is experienced online. The use of hypertext as an educational tool has a very rich history. The advent of the internet and one of its major application, the world wide web (WWW), has given a tremendous boost to the theory and practice of hypermedia systems for educational purposes. However, the web suffers from an inability to satisfy the heterogeneous needs of a large number of users. For example, web-based courses present the same static teaming material to students with widely differing knowledge of the subject. Adaptive hypermedia techniques can be used to improve the adaptability of eLearning. In this paper we report an approach to the design a unified implementation framework suitable for web-based eLearning that accommodates the three main dimensions of hypermedia adaptation: content, navigation, and presentation. The framework externalises the adaptation strategies using XML notation. The separation of the adaptation strategies from the source code of the eLearning software enables a system using the framework to quickly implement a variety of adaptation strategies. This work is a part of our more general ongoing work on the design of a framework for adaptive content delivery. parts of the framework discussed in this paper have been imulemented in a commercial eLearning engine.