Learning Design in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems

The purpose of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems is to define methods and techniques to deliver personalized learning support. Even their benefits and potentialities for educational contexts are clear, their use in real learning contexts is still rare. Reasons for this include the complexity of their development, their use of exclusive methods for defining adaptivity and educational elements, and their lack of interoperation amongst courses and applications. A possible alternative to cope with these issues is using as a common notational method the IMS Learning Design specification. This paper attempts to bring AEHS and IMS-LD closer to each other in order to define adaptive behaviour. To this end, we explain how IMS-LD could be used to define personalization properties and adaptive techniques. Based on that, we propose a component called Adaptive Learning Designs, and an authoring tool to create these components. Furthermore, the paper discusses the benefits and limitations of IMS-LD to define adaptive behaviour, and ends suggesting additional research lines.