A pedagogical interface for authoring adaptive e-learning courses

Due to the differences in background knowledge, learning styles and preferences, individual students may take very different approaches towards learning. In light of this, adaptive educational hypermedia systems (AEHSs) have been developed to offer students personalized learning content to improve their learning outcome. These systems typically use programming scripts and hierarchical course structures as primary techniques to support adaptive e-learning course authoring for different types of students. They require teachers not only to have substantial technical skills, but also to be able to implement theories of learning styles, which are tough requirements. In order for general teachers to participate in authoring adaptive e-learning courses, we have developed a novel and intuitive interface for teachers to graphically visualize and modify the learning contents to be delivered according to different student learning characteristics, based on a set of visual manipulators. The interface also allows teachers to adjust the study load distribution across different parts of a course. We have implemented the proposed interfacing mechanism in an online adaptive e-Learning system and conducted user studies to evaluate its effectiveness.