Adaptive Hypermedia: From Intelligent Tutoring

Systems to Web-Based Education

Peter Brusilovsky

Carnegie Technology Education and

HCI Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
4615 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
plb@cs.cmu.edu

Abstract. Adaptive hypermedia is a new area of research at the crossroads of

hypermedia and adaptive systems and. Education is the largest application area
of adaptive hypermedia systems. The goals of this paper are to provide a brief
introduction into adaptive hypermedia and supply the reader with an organized
reading on adaptive educational hypermedia. Unlike some other papers that are
centered around the current state of the field, this paper attempts, from one side,
to trace the history adaptive educational hypermedia in connection with
intelligent tutoring systems research and, from another side, draft its future in
connection with Web-based education.

1 Introduction

Adaptive hypermedia is a relatively new direction of research on the crossroads of

hypermedia and user modeling. One limitation of traditional "static" hypermedia
applications is that they provide the same page content and the same set of links to all
users. If the user population is relatively diverse, a traditional system will “suffer from
an inability to be all things to all people”. For example, a traditional educational
hypermedia system will present the same static explanation and suggest the same next
page to students with widely differing educational goals and knowledge of the
subject. Similarly, a static electronic encyclopedia will present the same information
and same set of links to related articles to readers with different knowledge and
interests. Finally, a static virtual museum will offer the same “guided tour” and the
same narration to visitors with very different goals and background knowledge.
Adaptive hypermedia is an alternative to the traditional “one-size-fits-all” approach
in the development of hypermedia systems. Adaptive hypermedia systems build a
model of the goals, preferences and knowledge of each individual user, and use this
model throughout the interaction with the user, in order to adapt the hypertext to the
needs of that user. For example, a student in an adaptive educational hypermedia
system will be given a presentation which is adapted specifically to his or her
knowledge of the subject [10], and a suggested set of most relevant links to proceed
further [4]. An adaptive electronic encyclopedia will personalise the content of an
article to augment the user's existing knowledge and interests [26]. A virtual museum
will adapt the presentation of every visited object to the user's individual path through
the museum [30].

G. Gauthier, C. Frasson, K. VanLehn (Eds.): ITS 2000, LNCS 1839, pp. 1-7, 2000.
 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000
2 Peter Brusilovsky

2 What Can Be Adapted in Adaptive Hypermedia

A typical hyperdocument consists of a set of nodes or "pages" connected by links.

Each page contains some local information and a number of links to related pages.
Hypermedia systems can also include special navigation tools such as table of
contents, index, and map that could be used to navigate to all accessible pages. What
can be adapted here are the page (content-level adaptation) and the appearance and
behavior of the links (link-level adaptation). In adaptive hypermedia literature they
are referred respectively as adaptive presentation and adaptive navigation support.
The goal of the adaptive presentation is to adapt the content of a hypermedia page
to the user's goals, knowledge and other information stored in the user model. There
could be multiple reasons to use adaptive presentation. Two typical cases in the area
of education are comparative explanations and explanation variants. The idea of
comparative explanations is to connect new content to the existing knowledge of the
student. A page can have one or more hidden comparative explanation fragments that
comparing some aspects of new topic with relevant aspects of other topic [15]. For
example, "while" loop in C++ language could be compared with the same construct in
Pascal. Only students with relevant previous knowledge will (knowledge of Pascal
loops in our example) will see the comparison. The idea of explanation variants is to
use essentially different variants of explanations for users with different level of
knowledge of the topic. A system can store several variants for some parts of the page
content. For example, a variant prepared for a medical experts can use extensive Latin
terminology, while a variant prepared for novices can use everyday names for
illnesses and body parts [2; 17; 34].
The goal of adaptive navigation support is to help users to find their paths in
hyperspace by adapting link presentation and functionality to the goals, knowledge,
and other characteristics of an individual user. It is typically done by one of the
following ways:
• Direct guidance: The system outlines visually one of the links on the page showing
that this is the best link to follow or generates an additional dynamic link (usually
called "next") which is connected to the "next best" page.
• Link sorting: The system sorts all the links of a particular page according to the
user model and to some user-valuable criteria: the closer to the top, the more
relevant the link is.
• Link annotation: The system augments the links with some form of comments,
which can tell the user more about the nodes behind the annotated links. These
annotations are usually provided in the form of visual cues. Typical visual cues
include icons [7; 12], font colors [5; 10], sizes [20], and types [7].
• Link hiding, disabling, and removal: The system tries to prevent the user from
following links that are not relevant for him or her at the moment. There are
several ways to achieve it. A link can be hidden by turning a usually underlined
hotword into a normal word. It can be disabled so that clicking on the hotword will
produce no effect [10]. For a non-contextual link the very anchor (hotword or
hotspot) can be removed [5].
A number of interesting forms and applications of adaptive presentation and adaptive
navigation support were developed since 1990. A more comprehensive review can be
found in [3].
 Adaptive Hypermedia: From Intelligent Tutoring Systems to Web-Based Education 3

3 From Intelligent Tutoring Systems to Adaptive Hypermedia

Education was always the most popular application area for adaptive hypermedia
systems. A number of interesting methods and techniques of adaptive hypermedia
were originally developed for in various adaptive educational hypermedia systems. In
turn, most of the early research on adaptive educational hypermedia was inspired by
the area of intelligent tutoring systems [2; 7; 15; 17; 20; 22; 31] and were born in a
trial to combine an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) and an educational hypermedia.
In the early times of ITS, most of these systems provide little or no learning
material. The most important duty of an ITS was to support a student in the process of
problem solving. It was assumed that the required knowledge is acquired outside of
the system, for example, by attending a lecture or reading a textbook. Along with the
growth of computer capabilities more and more ITS developers found it reasonable to
provide an ITS and a learning material in electronic form in one package. Very soon it
became clear that hypertext or hypermedia provides the best option for organizing on-
line learning material. A combination of an ITS and a learning material organized as
hypermedia was a natural starting point for the research on adaptive educational
hypermedia. A number of research groups has independently realized that a
hypermedia system coupled with an ITS can offer more functionality than a
traditional static educational hypermedia.
Adaptive presentation came first. Adaptive presentation was the natural and the
simplest way to make the hypermedia component of the system to use some
knowledge about individual students represented in a student model of ITS. A number
of adaptive presentation methods and techniques were explored in early projects. In
particular, comparative explanations method was used in Lisp-Critic [15] and
explanation variants method was used in Lisp-Critic [15], Anatom-Tutor [2], and
SYPROS [17].
In our ITS for programming domain ITEM/IP [6] we have explored several
adaptive presentation methods including explanation variants. Our goal was to
achieve a gradual transformation of the learning material from an explanation-rich
textbook to a concise manual. We have developed a simple but powerful technique
known as "conditional text". With this technique, all information about that could be
presented on a page is divided into several chunks of texts. Each chunk is associated
with a condition on the state of user knowledge stored in the user model. When
assembling a page for presentation the system selects only the chunks with true
condition. This technique is a low-level technique (it requires some "programming"
work from the author to set all the required conditions) but it is also very flexible. By
choosing appropriate conditions on the knowledge level of the current concept and
related concepts represented in the user model we were able to implement several
adaptive presentation methods. A simple example is hiding chunks that contain
additional explanations if the user's knowledge of the current concept is good enough,
or turning on a chunk with comparative explanations if the corresponding related
concept is already known. This conditional text technique was later independently
developed by Kay and Kummerfeld [21] and De Bra [10] and became quite popular in
Web-based adaptive systems.
The work on adaptive navigation support in educational hypermedia was
influenced by research on curriculum sequencing. Curriculum sequencing is one of
the oldest ITS technologies. The goal of the curriculum sequencing is to provide the
4 Peter Brusilovsky

student with the most suitable individually planned sequence of knowledge units to
learn and sequence of learning tasks (examples, questions, problems, etc.) to work
with. In other words, it helps the student to find an "optimal path" through the
learning material. Early ITS with curriculum sequencing were able to sequence only
one kind of learning tasks - problems to for the student to solve [1; 25]. More recent
ITS such as ITEM/IP [8], TOBIE [38] and ECAL [14] were able to deal with more
rich educational material. The early work on adaptive navigation support in
educational hypermedia was simply a trial to apply the ideas of sequencing in a
hypermedia context. From the first sight, a dynamic linear sequence of learning tasks
produced by a sequencing-based ITS and a static network of educational hypermedia
pages looks like two contradictory approaches to organizing access to the learning
material. However, these approaches are really complementary. The key is that a
typical sequencing engine can do more than just selecting the "next best" task. On the
way to the "best", such an engine can usually classify all available tasks into non-
relevant and relevant candidates. For example, a task can be considered non-relevant
if it was already completed in the past or if it is not ready to be learned due to the lack
of prerequisite knowledge and experience. After excluding non-relevant tasks a
sequencing engine use some approach to pick up the best of relevant tasks. In a
hyperspace of learning material where each learning task is represented by a separate
page an ability to distinguish "ready", "not-ready", or "best" tasks is a direct
precondition for adaptive navigation support.
In our systems ITEM/PG [6] and ISIS-Tutor [5] we explored several ways of
adaptive navigation support. We have used direct guidance in the form of "teach me"
button to provide a one-click access to the next best task. We have used adaptive
annotation to color-code the links to "ready", "not-ready", and "already learned" tasks.
In one of the versions of ISIS-Tutor we have applied adaptive link removal to remove
all links to not-ready tasks. From our point of view a sequencing-based adaptive
navigation support in educational hypermedia is "best of both worlds". Choosing next
task in an ITS with sequencing is based on machine intelligence. Choosing next task
in a traditional hypermedia is based on human intelligence. Adaptive navigation
support is an interface that can integrate the power of machine and human
intelligence: a user is free to make a choice while still seeing an opinion of an
intelligent system. From this point of view we can speculate that adaptive navigation
support is a natural way to add some intelligence to adaptive hypermedia system. It is
not surprising that several research groups have independently developed major
adaptive navigation support techniques such as direct guidance [42], hiding [10; 31],
and annotation [12].

4 Adaptive Hypermedia for Web-Based Education

The year of 1996 could be considered a turning point in adaptive hypermedia

research. The key factor here is the rapid increase in the use of the Word Wide Web.
The Web, with its clear demand for adaptivity, served to boost adaptive hypermedia
research, providing both a challenge and an attractive platform.
We know only four Web-based adaptive educational hypermedia systems
developed by 1996: ELM-ART [7], InterBook [4], PT [21], and 2L670 [11]. These
“classic” systems have influenced a number of more recent systems. The Web
 Adaptive Hypermedia: From Intelligent Tutoring Systems to Web-Based Education 5

platform enabled these systems to live much longer than similar pre-Web systems and
influence a number of more recent systems. In particular, ELM-ART gave a start to a
whole tree of systems including InterBook, AST, ADI, ART-WEB, and ACE. It is not
surprising that all adaptive educational hypermedia systems developed since 1996 are
Web-based systems. Examples are: Medtech [13], AST [36], ADI [33], HysM: [23],
AHM [32], MetaLinks [27], CHEOPS [28], RATH [19], TANGOW [9], Arthur [16],
CAMELEON [24], KBS-Hyperbook [18], AHA! [10], SKILL [29], Multibook [37],
ACE [35], ART-Web [41].
The introduction of the Web has impacted not only on the number of adaptive
educational hypermedia systems, but also on the type of systems being developed. All
the early systems were essentially lab systems, built to explore some new methods,
which used adaptivity in an educational context. In contrast, a number more recent
systems provide complete frameworks and even authoring tools for developing Web-
based courses. The appearance of a number of authoring tools is not only indicative of
the maturity of adaptive educational hypermedia, but also a response to a Web-
provoked demand for user-adaptive distance education courses.
Existing adaptive hypermedia frameworks such as InterBook, ART-Web, ACE,
AHA!, SKILL, MetaLinks or Multibook are getting strikingly close to commercial
tools for developing Web-based courses such as WebCT [40] or TopClass [39].
Developers of adaptive hypermedia frameworks are clearly interested in making their
systems suitable for handling real Web courses. From another side, developers of
commercial course management systems are becoming interested in adaptive and
personalized systems. In this situation we could hope that adaptive hypermedia
technology that was originally developed inside the area of ITS will soon be used in
commercial-strength Web-based systems to deliver thousands of real world courses to
students all over the world.

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