A simple web-based adaptive educational system (SWAES)

An adaptive educational system is complex to model. Such a system should allow various didactic, educational and student styles and is traditionally divided into four modules for analysis and building: Domain Knowledge Base, Tutoring, the Student Interface, and the Student. In particular, the system should adapt to differences between students and the changes in a particular student. One of the main problems when trying to develop an adaptive educational system is that definitions used for instructional design by psychologists and pedagogy experts are vague, while developers work with concrete terms like variables, stochastic values and objects. To make the concept of an adaptive educational system more concrete, this work models the simplest possible adaptive educational system that could exist. The contribution of the paper is that it gives a good description of a basic adaptive educational system and reasons about concrete solutions. The novelty in the paper is that adaptivity occurs in each of the four modules: The system selects an appropriate domain knowledge base model, an appropriate tutoring model, an appropriate (student) Interface model, and an appropriate Student model. Use of these modules will facilitate the design of adaptive educational systems that are educationally effective and will benefit future research and development on adaptive educational systems.