Adaptive and Intelligent Technologies for Web-based Education

Peter Brusilovsky

Carnegie Technology Education and

Human-Computer Interaction Institute

Carnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

plb@cs.cmu.edu

Abstract:

context of Web-based distance education. We analyze what kind of technologies are

available right now, how easy they can be implemented on the Web, and what is the

place of these technologies in large-scale Web-based education.

The paper provides a review of adaptive and intelligent technologies in a

1 Introduction

Web-based education (WBE) is currently a hot research and development area. Benefits of

Web-based education are clear: classroom independence and platform independence. Web

courseware installed and supported in one place can be used by thousands of learners all over the

world that are equipped with any kind of Internet-connected computer. Thousands of Web-based

courses and other educational applications have been made available on the Web within the last

five years. The problem is that most of them are nothing more than a network of static hypertext

pages. A challenging research goal is the development of advanced Web-based educational

applications that can offer some amount of adaptivity and intelligence. These features are

important for WBE applications since distance students usually work on their own (often from

home). An intelligent and personalized assistance that a teacher or a peer student can provide in a

normal classroom situation is not easy to get. In addition, being adaptive is important for Webbased

courseware because it has to be used by a much wider variety of students than any

"standalone" educational application. A Web courseware that is designed with a particular class

of users in mind may not suit other users.

Since the early days of the Web, a number of research teams have implemented different

kinds of adaptive and intelligent systems for on-site and distance WBE. The goal of this paper is

to provide a brief review of the work performed so far in his area. The review is centered on

different adaptive and intelligent

compatibility with earlier papers on adaptive hypermedia [7] and Web-based ITS [6]. By

adaptive and intelligent technologies we mean essentially different ways to add adaptive or

intelligent functionality to an educational system. A technology usually could be further

dissected into finer grain techniques and methods, which corresponds to different variations of

this functionality and different ways of its implementation. In the next section we analyze what

kind of technologies are available right now, and how easy they can be implemented on the Web.

After that we discuss what is the place of these technologies in large-scale Web-based education.

technologies. We stay on the level of technologies to provide

2 Web-based educational systems: a review of technologies

Web-based Adaptive and Intelligent Educational Systems (AIES) are not an entirely new

kind of