Adaptivity in e-learning

The general purpose of educational platforms is to provide students with information as well as with practical opportunities in order to help learners to acquire certain skills and to increase their active knowledge about a studied topic. However, different learners may have different characteristics, prior knowledge, motivation or needs. This diversity commonly requires the presentation of different information to different learners in a different format. That is why it is very important to develop adaptive educational systems which consider various aspects of individual students and tailor the learning process to meet the actual learner’s needs. In this paper there are described basic demands put on an adaptive e-learning system. Basic types of barriers discouraging e-learning systems from being more used are mentioned. Comparison of several available e-learning systems (mostly open source ones) is done from the point of their adaptivity. Practical experience with utilization of various e-learning systems is given in the end of the paper. In particular there are three systems discussed Moodle, MULTIPES and MetaTool.