Is Semi-Automatic Authoring of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia Possible?

Abstract

Adaptive Hypermedia (AEH) is considered, in principle, superior to regular Hypermedia, due to the fact that it allows personalization and customization. However, the creation of good quality AEH is not trivial. Nowadays, a lot of research concentrates on the authoring challenge in adaptive hypermedia. We previously introduced the LAOS model, a five-layer adaptive hypermedia authoring model that describes AEH in a detailed way, to allow flexible re-composition of its elements, according to the personalization requirements. However, such a detailed structure claims a lot of time to populate with AEH instances. Alternatively, we propose semi-automatic authoring techniques that populate the whole structure based on a small initial subset that has been actually authored by a human. We analyze here the different possible initial subsets, and the resulting structures, based on the LAOS architecture. Moreover, we examine if the flexibility of the whole was in any way affected by the replacement of human authoring with automatic authoring. We see the latter as yet another step towards adaptive hypermedia that 'writes itself'.