Facilitating the comprehension of online learning courses with adaptivity

Abstract

Knowledge acquisition with texts is assumed to be a process of building a mental model of the specific subject. For readers with more prior knowledge, the building of an accurate mental model is easier because they do not have to establish a new structure. Readers with less or no prior knowledge might build an inadequate mental model of a subject. In a hypertext learning environment this could be prevented by several adaptive features that support the user with additional information. We plan to examine the effectiveness and efficiency of such adaptive features within an online course by assessing the user's acquired domain knowledge, the user's satisfaction, and achievement of the user's objectives.