Adaptation to learning styles in E-Learning: Approach evaluation

It is obvious that we all have different approaches to learning. Psychologists call these individual differences learning styles (LS). Researchers provide recommendations for possible instructional strategies to support some LS in educational settings and, in particular, in web-based environments. The problem with most existing implementations is that the systems are bound to a certain LS model, and the LS representation it involves is defined and implemented by the designers of the system. The purpose of our approach is to separate definition of strategies from the system implementation and to allow authors or psychologists to define their own strategies in a domain- and LS-model independent way. We define a language for specifying instructional strategies and strategies for monitoring a learner's preferences, and a way of applying and visualizing them in the AHA! (Adaptive Hypermedia Architecture) system. This paper presents the results of our approach evaluation from the point of view of LS authoring easiness and satisfaction with the resulting adaptation.