1. ADAPT "Adaptivity and adaptability in ODL based on ICT"
Alexandra Cristea
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

2. Contents Project data at a glance Goal People Types of activities
Evaluation/ dissemination strategies
Outcome of the project
Products and outputs: Adapt papers
Global time-table
Interesting information!!
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

3. Project data at a glance
Minerva (Socrates) project: ADAPT
project reference number: CP NL-MINERVA-MPP*
Duration of project (in months): 24
Number of partners: 6
Partner countries involved: The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Italy
Sub-title: “Adaptivity and adaptability in ODL based on ICT”
Project site:
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

4. Why adaptation in ODL? Problems with hypermedia applications:
navigational freedom: which links are relevant (for this learner) ?
comprehension: what has the learner seen before when reaching a certain node?
presentation: what fits the learner’s screen? how much network bandwidth and processing power is available?
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

5. The need for personalization in LLL
The non-linear nature of hypertext environments offers opportunities as well as certain difficulties for the users. The reader constantly makes a decision about where to go next. It is quite easy for him to lose orientation.
Hypertext also has comprehension problem, it provides the same information in the same way to users without considering their features while users with different goals may be interested in different information. They also may want navigate along different paths depending on their goals and prior knowledge. For example, this is especially important in educational systems to make sure that learner sees those content relevant to his/her learning goals.
These considerations explain the need in some way to provide an individual approach for different users. Adaptive hypermedia is a solution to solve this problem the problems of hypertext. It is hypertext (or hypermedia) adapted to users’ features. Adaptive hypermedia is a relatively new direction of research on the crossroad of hypermedia and user modeling.
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

6. Opportunities with adaptation
guide learners towards relevant information (users can reach relevant information more easily and more quickly)
make sure learners can understand the presented information
change the presentation so that it fits the learner’s platform and environment
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

7. Is adaptation possible?
Yes: adaptive systems exist; some people even claim they work well.
Maybe: (how) can adaptive systems find out what learners want/need?
Maybe not: can authors/designers correctly interpret the system’s input to design appropriate adaptation?
Main project issue!!
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

8. Gerhard Fischer 1 HFA Lecture, OZCHI’2000
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

9. ADAPT goal
to establish a European platform of standards (guidelines, techniques and tools) for user modeling -based adaptability and adaptation, in the sense of the new paradigm of intelligent human -computer interaction, based on the new generation of ODL tools, towards individualization of the learning process.
aims at virtual campuses, e-learning, students tutoring and services, with special focus on adaptation to the learner's needs.
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

10. People
Rik & Italo – Twente: pioneers in use and research of technology in education
Carlo – natural language processing
Franca – design patterns experience
Hugh – Microcosm (one of the few commercial hypertext systems)
Tim Brailsford: WHURLE project: transclusion – simple adaptation user model – creating individualized virtual docs
Helen Ashman: hypertext & hypermedia, book on new frontiers of learning
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

11. Types of activities project meetings, study of existing practices,
system development,
evaluation meetings,
reports, project workshop,
dissemination, testing, conferences, workshops
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

12. Target groups
university students from the 3 countries involved (The Netherlands, Italy and United Kingdom) and others,
teaching staff from the institutions participating in the project and outside,
researchers in these disciplines,
the larger research community,
the standards community
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

13. Evaluation/ dissemination strategies
PROJECT MONITORING
EVALUATION STRATEGIES
DISSEMINATION IN THE PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES AND BEYOND
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

14. PROJECT MONITORING
Progress is monitored by the project leader during the whole duration of the project.
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

15. EVALUATION STRATEGIES
self-evaluation and distribution of own results, partner cross-evaluation,
peer evaluation,
user feedback (from students and course developers),
external experts, opinion exchange, written evaluations, suitability evaluation, using both empirical methods (i.e., user testing) and inspection methods (e.g., heuristic evaluation) and
finally an overall achievement test and evaluation.
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

16. DISSEMINATION IN THE PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES AND BEYOND
The initial outputs of the project will be exploited by the partners.
The output and deliverables list itself includes dissemination of findings and products, via
international conferences and workshops,
Internet publication (on-line dissemination of project results and deliverables) and
contacting the IEEE LTTF LTSC standard committee.
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

17. Outcome of the project
The project’s main outcome is to significantly contribute not only towards standardization of the new generation of ODL adaptation techniques and tools, but also to provide alternate styles of teaching and learning, optimally suited for ODL or a combination of ODL and traditional classroom teaching.
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

18. Products and outputs
a set of relevant good practices of adaptation techniques for education and counter-examples,
a minimal set of relevant, necessary features for adaptation techniques in education and counter-examples,
research of integration of adaptive hypermedia elements into existing learning environments,
reports, both internal and external (conferences, workshops, etc.),
a sample authoring system for adaptive techniques in education, one (or more) training system(s) based on the minimal set of relevant adaptive features,
evaluation, dissemination and promotion of results.
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

19. Methods to produce outputs
R1: a set of relevant good practices of (user modelling based) adaptation techniques for education, based on current technology:
TU/e, MP, UT, USH and UN will participate towards this output. All institutions have already a lot of experience with adaptation and adaptability.
opinion exchange, web forum for collecting and agreeing upon the initial starting point data
to organize ideas, writing some collaborative papers for international conferences
Ulterior discussions, implementations, testing and evaluation will refine this result.
R2 as a by-product of the above, it will generate counter-examples of sets of bad practices (or techniques) of (user modelling based) adaptation techniques for education, for a clear distinction from the above: All partners from R1 will try to also give counter-examples of adaptive and adaptable techniques that have been misused. These compilations will be based on the experience of the partners, and also start as a collection of opinions and inputs on a web page. A final version will be able to be compiled into a paper - but, for obvious reasons, this product will lead to no implementations.
R3 a minimal set of relevant, necessary features for adaptation techniques in education. Generate typical features for distributed (Internet) environments, multimedia environments: All partners at R1 will also be involved here. R3 will be build on the basis of R1 and also partially on R2. Implementers have a tendency of prefering their own (adaptive) implementations to others, even if the results are similar, or suggest that no adaptivity is necessary. Attempting to obtain this product will prevent the result of this project of being the advertizing of systems with arbitrary amounts of adaptivity and adaptability implemented, and will force us (and other implementers and users after us, who will use our guidelines) to better justify their choices.
R4 a supplementary set of relevant (but not essential) features for adaptation techniques in education, as well as a few counter-examples of irrelevant features detected: all partners that will work on R1 will have a say for R4. R4 will be, simply put, obtained as {R1 - R3}, but, as both R1 and R3 will not be univoquely determined, we expect to obtain several "add-to" adaptation features, that are not strictly necessary, but might still enhance the learning output.
R5 Research of integration of adaptive hypermedia elements into existing learning environments (interfacing techniques): USH will be involved mostly in this issue. As it is non-realistic to expect teachers and learning environment users beyond our group to take over our products and recommendations, if they require from scratch installation and/ or programming (especially if their institution has already invested a considerable budget for a specific learning environment), we need to address the issue of add-in adaptation. The way of how to interface with existing learning environments needs to be researched. At USH, they have already experience with similar interfacing studies, and they will be able to use the same techniques for the current research.
R6 Reports of the above, both internal (mid-stage), for partner’s information and usage, and external, at conferences, workshops, etc. (e.g., AH, E-Learning, ITS, UM, ED-MEDIA, CEC, etc.); final report will also be sent to standard bodies (IEEE, LTTF): a number of international conferences of the adaptive hypermedia community, and many of the learning environments community will be attended by the project partners, in order to disseminate the partial or final results of the project. Prior to this, internal meetings will take place, and internal reports will help the partners coordinate their activities and benefit from each-thers' results.
R7 a sample authoring system for adaptive techniques in education generated above: this output is based in outputs R1-R5, but can be started in parallel with the above work, in order to gain time. At least one authoring systems should be implemented as a test bed of our collaborations. Parters have expressed their interest in building their own authoring tools - or using already buit ones, for extension with new functionalities discovered to be necessary during the project collaboration. R8 separately, one (or more) training system(s) based on the minimal set of relevant adaptive features, with possible addition of supplementary features:
R8 can be built based on R7 or independently. TU/e, UN, UT already have environments that they want to improve and that they want to exchange with the other project partners.
R9 evaluation, dissemination and promotion of results, especially focusing on the spread of understanding the innovative impact of the new issue of adaptivity and adaptability in the ODL, for classroom-based learning, distance learning modes or a combination of both and on the transferability to other domains.: All partners will be involved in the evaluation, dissemination and promotion of results. In section 4, subsection 4 we have enumerated some evaluation (cross-evaluation, peer evaluation, user feedback, verbal, written, etc.) and dissemination strategies (workshops, seminars, conferences). Moreover, for evaluation, we also consider such aspects such as usability evaluation of the project approach as well acceptability - in academic and industrial environment. Here we can exploit the experience of the IST project UWA – Ubiquitous web applications (of MP), where they developed customization technologies and design methods for ubiquitous web application and are validating (by means of questionaires and focus groups) their approach. Similar methods might be applied here.
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

20. ADAPT Papers http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/~alex/HTML/Minerva/papers/
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

21. We
are
here
background study
system development
testing & 2nd prototype
final test
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece

22. Interesting information
IFETS Discussion:
4000 people subscribed to IFETS discussion list: regular discussions on topics related to educational technology
July 2003
Alexandra Cristea will moderate a discussion on:
adaptive (and adaptable) hypermedia applied in education, at the moment, from an authoring point of view. You’re all invited to participate!!
3rd of June, 2003
CEDEFOP workshop: Policy, Practice, Partnership: Getting to Work on Lifelong Learning, Thessaloniki, Greece