Recent Contributions to the Development of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems Architectures

Abstract

The asynchronous education is a challenge for the development of new methods and troubleshooting in areas such as Human-Computer Interaction. The objective is to develop software that would incorporate all the advantages of an experienced and well educated human tutor, using the capabilities of modern Internet and computer systems that make up. To achieve such an objective one requires the use of modern learning theories, cognitive psychology, diagnostic methods and techniques of instruction, from the area of science education. It is also necessary to apply methodologies that allow us to transform qualitative characteristics of the students, or the teaching material and assessments in purely quantitative terms, that is manageable by the machines. Such methods may be obtained from the fuzzy logic, by Bayesian models or neural networks that allow the handling of new situations on the basis of previous experience. Many scientific disciplines, contribute to the development of new methods in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems. These systems are the true heirs of Learning Management Systems of the 90s and Intelligent Tutoring Systems of the 21st century’s first decade. The main feature here is the concept of adaptivity. This property, on which the Adaptive WEB rely on, asks for new requirements for any single AEHS’s element. For example, adaptive retrieve of learning objects from their repositories, requires the use of semantic markup that accompany each learning object.  Below, we will try to describe the research activity, which takes place in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Democritus University of Thrace, School of Engineering.