Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Nahla Aljojo et al.
Adaptive hypermedia research has received more attention during the last two decades, however it
still is unclear which aspects of learning styles are worth modeling, and what can be done differently
for users with different learning styles. An adaptive e-learning hypermedia is an approach whose
target is to personalize the learning experience for the learner (De Bra et al., 2004; Henze and Nejdl,
2004). A number of adaptive educational systems have been developed based on learning styles as
a source for adaptation, including: AEC-CS (Trantafillou et al., 2002), INSPIRE (Grigoriadou et al.,
2001), iWeaver (Wolf, 2003), MASPLANG (Peña et al, 2002; Peña, 2004), LSAS (Bajraktarevic et al,
2003), EDUCE (Kelly, 2005) and ILASH (Bajraktarevic et al., 2003a). One of the key challenges in
such adaptive learning systems is the development of robust experimental evaluation mechanisms to
assess their impact on student's achievement. For instance, Brown et al. (2009) investigated adaptive
e-learning hypermedia that specially utilizes learning style as their adaptation mechanism; they found
that out of 10 systems, 6 systems did not seem to have published any quantitative evaluations in their
recent research. Typical would be AES-CS (Triantafillou et al., 2003) and INSPIRE (Papanikolaou et
al., 2003) which uses some empirical data in the form of descriptive statistics and but no inferential
statistics testing, and the number of users were relatively small (n = 10 and n = 23, respectively).
A common evaluation approach involves comparing performance on an adaptive learning system with
non-adaptive versions for different cohorts of users. However, there are many challenges with
comparing non-adaptive with adaptive version of learning systems (De Bra, 2000). Any difference
between the groups’ performances might be attributed to users’ features (e.g. initial knowledge, goals
etc) or wider environment.
This paper presents an approach to integrate learning styles into adaptive e-learning hypermedia
system and an approach to evaluate the impact of such a learning system. This paper hopes to make
contribution by presenting a further case study of a dedicated adaptive educational system and
providing guidance and discussion on both development issues and how to evaluate the effectiveness
of an adaptive learning system. Existing adaptive learning systems are predominantly English based.
This paper hopes to make further contribution by bring adaptive learning capability to on-English
speaking communities.
1.2 Felder-Silverman Learning Style Model
In Felder-Silverman learning style model (FSLSM) (Felder and Silverman, 1988), learners are
characterized by values on four dimensions. Table 1: summarizes learning environment preferences
of typical learners from each of the four dimensions of the Felder Silverman model. The FSLSM
provides a good base to develop adaptive learning systems (Aljojo and Adams 2009; Aljojo and
Adams 2010) and was used as the base in the Teacher Assisting and Subject Adaptive Material
(TASAM) system described in this paper.
Table 1: Felder’s learning dimensions
Active Explains to others Tries things out, works within a group, discusses and
Reflective Thinks before doing something, works alone
Sensing Learns from and memorizes facts, solves problems by well-established
methods, patient with details, works slower
Intuitive Discovers possibilities and relationships, innovative, easily grasp new concepts,
abstractions and mathematical formulation, works faster
Visual Learns from pictures, diagrams, flow charts, time lines,
films, multimedia content and demonstrations
Verbal Learns form written and spoken explanations
Sequential Learns and thinks in linear/sequential steps
Global Learns in large leaps, absorbing material almost randomly
The reasons to choose this learning style theory in this research are:
Its Index of Learning Style (ILS) questionnaire (Felder and Soloman, 2003) provides a convenient
and practical approach to establish the dominant learning style of each student.
The results of ILS can be linked easily to adaptive environments (Paredes And Rodriguez,
2002).
It is most appropriate and feasible to be implemented for hypermedia courseware (Carver, et al.,
1999; Kinshuk and Lin, 2003).
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