Considering learning styles in adaptative web-based education

This paper shows a way of using some dimensions of learning styles of students in order to improve the efficiency of adaptive learning systems. Firstly, it reviews the literature and previous work related to the taxonomy of learning styles and its application to web-based education. Later, it introduces the Felder-Silverman learning style model and the procedure of extracting information about students’ learning styles from the Felder-Soloman ILS questionnaire. Then, it presents a mechanism of application of these dimensions to content sequencing. The example used to explain the adaptation effects is taken from a course developed with TANGOW, Task-based Adaptive learNer Guidance On the Web.This work has been sponsored by the Spanish Interdepartmental Commission of Science and Technology (CICYT), project numbers TEL1999-0181 and TIC2001-0685-C02-01