The challenge in learning design concepts: personalization and adaptation in virtual arrangements

This paper aims to present recent technological trends for virtual arrangements by focusing on personalization and adaptation strategies, to examine, discuss their characteristics and respective functionalities. Implementing these strategies in a virtual knowledge learning environment, different scenarios and educational prospective learning developments become available to different users. Further, this paper provides the framework for generating and offering individualization concepts in virtual knowledge learning environments. It concentrates on an enhanced individualized access to information and knowledge, particularly applied to the EDMedia project conducted at the Fraunhofer Institute Digital Media Technology since 2004. The system is designed according to user centered design principles following the recent trend for individualization and personalization. In the EDMedia project, prototypes were tested and continually redesigned during the experimentation. It was found that personalization and adaptivity strategies are highly required for user-centered learning settings.