Adaptive Hypermedia Tutorial System Based on AHA Jing Zhai Dublin City University

Outline Motivation System target Technical background System architecture Examples Conclusion

Motivation Nowadays the way people acquire knowledge has been diversified along with the development of information technology Traditional "static" hypermedia applications have its own limitation we need a dynamic and adaptive hypermedia application system

System target Provide an adaptive hypermedia tutorial authoring interface to tutorial authors and web- based education. Track user information regarding performance with online problem solving. Based on the above information, adapt the content to serve the user.

Adaptive Hypermedia Systems Build a model in terms of the “mental state” of the user: Explicit directives (user) Observing the interaction (user system) Requirement: Adapts the contents of each node to the appropriate level of difficulty Adding explanations where it needs Avoiding technical terms that cannot be understood Removing irrelevant detail Make system adaptable

AHA!, the “Adaptive Hypermedia Architecture”, was originally developed to support an on-line course with some user guidance through conditional explanations and conditional link hiding. It’s delivered as Open Source software, and written entirely in Java, using Servlets

J2EE Architecture

My tutorial system architecture

Domain model (DM) contains a set of concepts and concept relationships. Concepts are objects with a unique object identifier, and the relationships that includes prerequisite, link etc. DM is stored in the second layer of business logic in this tutorial system. Adaptation model (AM) describes the rule of adaptation, including content adaptation, link adaptation and the updating of user model. In our system, we describe the rules using XML files. Actually, in most of adaptive hypermedia systems, a set of rules would be hard coded into. User model (UM) consists of named entities in which we store a number of attribute-value pairs. Each entity could have different attributes, but most entities have the same ones in practice. Therefore, we use database table structure to represent user model.

The advantages of system architecture Client layer: use JSP or applet to present system interface dynamically or statically, meanwhile AJAX will be applied to assist the personalization. Middle layer: use J2EE components and containers to implement the different functions of system. EIS layer: use JDBC or Hibernate to construct the exchange bridge between Database and Middle layer.

Examples – login page

Examples – register page

Examples – test page

Examples – result page

Examples – directory page

Conclusion The aim of this project is tracking user information regarding to the performance with online problem solving, and adapting the contents served to the user based on above information. This personalised adaptive hypermedia tutorial system has achieved goals of personalization and adaptation. It is also a meta tutorial system, that is, by correctly configuration, it is suitable for test system in many subjects

Further work In this system, the adaptation is implemented by DM, AM, UM and programming, which have no enough flexibility or extensibility. In further work, we will focus on the principle of AHA engine, and establish an adaptation engine to describe and execute adaptation behavior.