Educational hypermedia: an evaluation study

The role of computers in education has changed significantly in the last years. Educational systems have exceeded passive teaming systems and now actively participate in the teaming process. Web-based educational systems, for example, supported by incorporated intelligent tutoring techniques, are able to adapt information and its presentation to each individual user, and dynamically support navigation through the hypermedia material. This paper deals with the evaluation of educational hypermedia. An adaptive hypermedia system was developed and implemented for this purposes. The system is based on a concept domain model and also considers the elements of knowledge uncertainty in the process of user modelling. Both models are used for system adaptation, which builds on adaptive link insertion in addition to traditional adaptive navigation support technologies, like annotation and direct guidance. The system has been evaluated in a real environment and the results of the experiments are discussed here. In the paper, adaptive hypermedia systems in general are described first. Then our system is described, which was used in the evaluation study. In the end, the experiments are described and the results analysed in details.