Integrating cognitively-oriented and pedagogically-oriented methods in adaptive educational hypermedia

Adaptive educational hypermedia (AEH) is a learning tool that adapts learning content and flow to students´ needs and offers students a freedom to explore materials. Adaptation and personalization in AEH are produced from interaction of learner, pedagogic, domain, adaptation, and presentation models. This paper discusses Knowledge Map, a prototype tool for managing and visualizing domain model of AEH and it integrates cognitively-oriented and pedagogically-oriented methods. Domain model organizes knowledge space, which contains a network of concepts or topics, and hyperspace, in which adaptation and personalization are offered to students. There are two methods implemented. The first method is cognitively-oriented, by which concepts learned in a course are organized in a network of concepts. With this first method, student can get a visualization of the network and explore nodes. The main drawback of this method is that students may get lost after doing deep exploration. The second is mixed pedagogically-oriented and cognitively-oriented method that organizes a course in a hierarchic structure of topics and sub-topics and a graph of concepts for each sub-topic. A Greedy algorithm has been implemented to guide students to certain topics. To test the methods´ performances, a quantitative experiment has been conducted with three tested parameters: impression, learnability, and helpfulness. The experiments results show that the mixed method visualization is more impressive as this is more helpful for students to understand learning materials than the other method. Furthermore, the mixed method is more learnable, as students find it easier to gain a whole view of learning materials organized by this method rather than those organized by the cognitively-oriented method.