Abstract. The importance of e-learning and e-commerce applications has significantly increased in the past few years. Seeking better design and implementation principles is a research goal with, potentially, a significant impact. One of the commonalities of both applications is user-centricity. Understanding user behavior is critical especially in user-centered applications such as e-commerce and e-learning. In this work we discuss some of the fundamental similarities and differences in e-commerce and formal e-learning adaptation and discuss lessons that could be learned. We argue that current user pattern mining techniques should take into account behavioral and educational theories for distance learning in order to be efficient.Keywords: Adaptation strategies, comparison study, E-learning, E-commerce.
IntroductionThe convergence of telecommunication and information technologies has enabled the realization of advanced tools for e-learning, on-line collaboration and content delivery. Two of the most popular applications of web based systems nowadays are elearning and e-commerce. Despite their differences, both types of applications are facing similar challenges: they rely on a "pull" model of information flow, they are hypermedia based, they use similar techniques for adaptation and they benefit from semantic technologies and Knowledge Management. The underlying business models also share the same basic principle: users access digital resources from a distance without the physical presence of a teacher or a seller. Since the importance of both applications has increased, better ways of designing and implementation are needed. Designers, developers and researchers of e-learning systems may learn some useful lessons from the e-commerce domain and vice-versa. There is a lot of common ground between the two types of applications; in this paper the focus is on understanding user behavior and the mechanisms that analyze, model and take advantage of it.