An Application of the LS-Plan System to an Educational Hypermedia

LS-Plan is a system capable to provide educational hypermedia with adaptivity. During the student’s navigation in hyperspace, the system, by means of a suitable interface, receives in input, for each visited learning node, a behavioral pattern, containing the student’s knowledge acquired or not acquired in that node and measured by a post-test questionnaire. Then, by means of the adaptation algorithms, the system returns a Learning Object Sequence to the hypermedia, just to be recommended to the student. In this work we investigate in detail the adaptation algorithms together with the didactic strategies behind them, through an application to a real learning domain, subdivided in five case studies. Moreover, we show in detail how the automated planner, embedded into the system, allows consistency checks during the arrangement of the pool of Learning Nodes, allowing the teacher to define possible didactic strategies during automatic course personalization. Finally, the performance of the system is evaluated by means of an experimental design with positive results.