Adaptive hypermedia, learning styles and strategies within the educational paradigm

The consequences of adapting the learning style and learning strategies differences have not been thoroughly pursued by adaptive hypermedia researchers. The undesired effect of ‘ordinary’ hypermedia learning systems is that they may not effectively target the students’ learning styles. Many researchers recognise the importance of personalising hypermedia to meet students’ needs and the literature review suggests that students perform better in hypermedia based learning environments that are configured to support their learning needs. Two novel adaptive systems have been developed, based on the theory of learning styles and learning strategies. This first part of the investigation presents the findings of an evaluation of a hypermedia learning system that incorporated global and sequential learning styles. Details of the design regarding the structure of the information and linking mechanisms are presented. A review of the results obtained by evaluating the use of the system suggests that students, who use hypermedia-learning environments that supported their preferred learning style, performed significantly better. Building on this learning styles research, the study presents the concept and design involved in building an adaptive hypermedia system that supports application and use of "higher order" learning strategies, such as summarising and questioning. The system has been named ILASH, standing for Incorporating Learning Strategies in Hypermedia. The thesis presents the findings of the evaluation of the system. Students are expected to achieve significant improvement in learning outcomes while interacting with the adaptive version of the system compared to the non-adaptive version. The results obtained from the summative evaluation suggest that the adaptive features provided by the system have significantly contributed towards improved learning performance. The development of the system emphasises the fact that adaptive educational systems can match some of the students’ learning preferences and may have implications on the design of web based educational courseware.