Creating adaptive textbooks with AHA!

AHA! stands for the Adaptive Hypermedia Architecture, an adaptive authoring and delivery platform developed as part of the Adaptive Hypermedia for All (or AHA!) project. (See http://aha.win.tue.nl/.) Adaptation in on-line textbooks makes it possible for learners to study the textbook in different ways without encountering difficulties. Link hiding and annotation guide users towards subjects they are "ready" to study. Adaptive sequencing or sorting helps them decide on a reading order for pages that teach them about a given concept. Conditional inclusion of fragments and stretchtext make it possible to provide additional or prerequisite explanations when needed or desired. In this roundtable (paper) we discuss the authoring process for adaptive textbooks created with AHA!. We cover the different authoring tools for concepts, concept relationships (like prerequisites) and adaptive object inclusion (for additional explanations). We also cover the process of completing an application by creating content pages in standard XHTML (or in XHTML+SMIL or SMIL 2.0) and by setting up a server. AHA! applications can also be created using other authoring tools, including Interbook (Brusilovsky et al, 1998) and MOT (Cristea et al, 2003), but this is described elsewhere