Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Systems: A Focus on Learning Styles

Learning style represents an important concept in educational psychology, having a significant effect on the learning process. However, most of today´s adaptive educational systems don´t take into account this dimension of the student profile. Those that do, only rely on a single learning style model and usually adopt a static and explicit approach to student modeling: the learner has to fill in a specific psychological questionnaire and the resulted categorization is stored once and for all in the system. This paper suggests an alternative approach, advocating the use of an integrative, unifying learning style model which is to be updated dynamically, by monitoring and analyzing the student´s behavior (i.e. the interactions with the system).