Adaptive Web Courses: a Categorial Framework

Adaptive hypermedia are suitable to offer flexible Web-based courses and can be useful to solve problems associated with the use of educational hypermedia as the inability to satisfy heterogeneous needs, match a web course to students and build different courses from a set of hypermedia materials. In this context, a framework based on Automata Theory and Category Theory named Hyper-Automaton is defined in order to create a semi-automated system for developing Web Courses. Courses are (nondeterministic finite) automata with output and links between pages are automata transitions (not HTML source) and thus, reusing the instructional material is straighforward. The categorial constructions of products, coproducts, limits, colimits, restriction, relabeling and reification morphisms have meaningful interpretation as constructors to define (possible complex) hypertext documents for web courses. Then we show how adaptive web courses (i.e., courses that adapt itself according to the behavior of the student) can be defined in this framework using categorial operations for adaptive presentation (or content-level adaptation) and adaptive navigation (or link-level adaptation).