s, which have never been used for

teaching real distance classes. The rest of them, a handful of systems mainly from ELM-ART

and AHA families, were used in a few relatively small classes. At the same time, none of the

dozens of commercial and "university-grown" Web courseware systems that are used in

hundreds of real distance courses applies adaptive and intelligent technologies. Does it mean that

research and practice in Web-based education area will never merge together?

The position of the author is the following. Web-based education itself is relatively young.

Until now different companies producing Web-based education systems were able to compete

on the market with their simple non-adaptive systems. However, a number of research level

systems have already clearly demonstrated the benefits of adaptive and intelligent technologies.

As long as the competition on the market of Web-based educational system will increase, “being

adaptive” or “being intelligent” will become an important factor for winning the customers.

Traditional Web-based education companies will start to include adaptive and intelligent

functionality. Research teams with solid experience in using adaptive and intelligent technologies

will found startup companies to bring their technology to the market. The first technologies to be

used in commercial systems will probably be sequencing technologies (page sequencing and

question sequencing) since they match very well to the current structure of Web-based education

systems. Next will come the turn of adaptive navigation support and model matching. Problemsolving

support technologies will stay on research level for longer, though we could expect the

market debut of small Web-based tutors that are aimed to support teaching a fragment of some

subject. I hope that the next five years will show us a number of examples of commercial-level

adaptive and intelligent systems as well as many new and exciting developments on the research

level.

System Ref. Adaptive

sequencing

Adaptive

navigation

support

Problem

solving

support

Intelligent

solution

analysis

Adaptive

presentation

ELM-ART [12] Page Annotation Partial Server Some

ELM-ART-II [53] Course,

tests

Annotation Partial Server Some

PATInterBook

[11] Page,

remedial

Annotation Partial Server Some

VC Prolog

Tutor

[39] Task,

remedial

Server

Table 1

hypermedia and ITS functionality

Adaptive and intelligent technologies in Web-based educational systems that combine adaptive

System Ref. Adaptive sequencing Adaptive

navigation

support

Adaptive

presentation

InterBook [9] Page Annotation Some

AST [46] Course Annotation Some

ADI [43] Course

(knowledge+interests)

Annotation Some