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Rapid growth of the volume of interactive questions available to the students of modern E-Learning courses placed the problem of personalized guidance on the agenda of E-Learning researchers. Without proper guidance, students frequently select too simple or too complicated problems and ended either bored or discouraged. This paper explores a specific personalized guidance technology known as adaptive navigation support. We developed JavaGuide, a system, which guides students to appropriate questions in a Java programming course, and investigated the effect of personalized guidance a three-semester long classroom study. The results of this study confirm the educational and motivational effects of adaptive navigation support.

Computer science educators are increasingly using interactive learning content to enrich and enhance the pedagogy of their courses.

Abstract:This paper presents an in-depth analysis of a nonconventional topic-based personalization approach for adaptive educational systems (AES) that we have explored for a number of years in the context of university programming courses. With this approach both student modeling and adaptation are based on coarse-grained knowledge units that we called topics. Our motivation for the topic-based personalization was to enhance AES transparency for both teachers and students by utilizing typical topic-based course structures as the foundation for designing all aspects of an AES from the domain model to the end-user interface. We illustrate the details of the topic-based personalization technology, with the help of the Webbased educational service QuizGuide -the first system to implement it. QuizGuide applies the topicbased personalization to guide students to the right learning material in the context of an undergraduate C programming course. While having a number of architectural and practical advantages, the suggested coarse-grained personalization approach deviates from the common practices toward knowledge modeling in AES. Therefore, we believed, that several aspects of QuizGuide required a detailed evaluation -from modeling accuracy to the effectiveness of adaptation. How can one evaluate the soundness of a user modeling (UM) approach, rather than a specific personalized system? The paper discusses how this new student modeling approach can be evaluated, and presents our attempts to evaluate it from multiple different prospects. The evaluation of QuizGuide across several consecutive semesters demonstrates that, although topics do not always support precise UM, they can provide a basis for successful personalization in AESs. Keywords:Adaptive Hypermedia, Student Modeling, Adaptive Educational System, Adaptive Navigation Support, Adaptive Link Annotation, Topic-based Adaptation, Topic-based User Modeling, Adaptive System Evaluation, Layered EvaluationThe first page should include the following declaration: "This paper or a similar version is not currently under review by a journal or conference, nor will it be submitted to such within the next three months. This paper is free of plagiarism or self-plagiarism as defined in Springer's Policy on Publishing Integrity. Abstract:This paper presents an in-depth analysis of a nonconventional topic-based personalization approach for adaptive educational systems (AES) that we have explored for a number of years in the context of university programming courses. With this approach both student modeling and adaptation are based on coarse-grained knowledge units that we called topics. Our motivation for the topic-based personalization was to enhance AES transparency for both teachers and students by utilizing typical topic-based course structures as the foundation for designing all aspects of an AES from the domain model to the end-user interface. We illustrate the details of the topic-based personalization technology, with the help of the Web-based educational service Quiz...

Abstract. This paper is focused on user modeling and adaptation in distributed E-Learning systems. We describe here CUMULATE, a generic student modeling server developed for a distributed E-Learning architecture, KnowledgeTree. We also introduce a specific, topic-based knowledge modeling approach which has been implemented as an inference agent in CUMULATE and used in QuizGuide, an adaptive system that helps students select the most relevant self-assessment quizzes. We also discuss our attempts to evaluate this multi-level student modeling.