Bringing scrutability to adaptive hypertext teaching

Abstract

There is considerable appeal in using adaptive hypertext for teaching. It should provide the teacher with the possibility of creating teaching materials which can be customised to match the individual student’s background and preferences. This paper describes ADAPT-Tutor, a scrutable adaptive hypertext system. This enables the learner to scrutinise the system to determine how the document was adapted. They are also able to control the adaptation by altering the student model at any time in the interaction. The student can see which parts of the student model have been used to control aspects which appear in the document. The system has three major parts: ADAPT for authoring; Tutor for the student interface; and ATML is the language used for adaptive hyper- text source documents. This paper describes the student view, in Tutor, especially the scrutability support. We describe the use of ADAPT-Tutor in a large first year course. The paper discusses the use made of the scrutability support.