A Flexible Mechanism for Providing Adaptivity Based on Learning Styles in Learning Management Systems

While today´s learning management systems (LMSs) provide lot of support for teachers to assist them in holding online courses, they typically do not consider students´ individual differences in the composition and structure of courses. In this paper, we introduce a mechanism for extending LMSs´ functionality to provide learners with courses that fit their individual learning styles, using adaptive sorting and adaptive annotation in order to highlight the learning objects (LOs) that support students´ learning process the best. The mechanism enables teachers to add adaptivity to their already existing courses, using a flexible course structure in order to avoid limiting the richness of the learning resources and materials. Besides being flexible to teachers´ needs, the adaptive mechanism aims at asking teachers for as little as possible additional effort when using it, requiring teachers only to choose the corresponding type of LO when creating an LO in the authoring tool of the LMS.