Pros and Cons of Adaptive Hypermedia in Web-Based Education

Hypertext and hypermedia applications allow users to navigate through large sets of information in many different ways. It is impossible for an author to foresee all possible paths a user may follow. Adaptive hypermedia is a fairly new research field on the crossroad of hypertext (or hypermedia) and user modeling. Its goal is to improve usability of hypermedia through the automatic adaptation of hypermedia applications to individual users. Adaptive hypermedia systems (AHS) offer methods and techniques for adapting the content of information pages and the links between pages. A number of experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the benefits of adaptive hypermedia, mostly of adaptation of link structures. In this article we argue that the benefits of using an AHS are a result of careful authoring, more than of the adaptive techniques themselves.