Towards the Adaptation of Scientific Course Material powered by Communities of Practice

Several applications support the adaptation of course material. Even though most of these systems allow to specify interaction preferences or even employ user modeling techniques, every system is an island with this respect. In particular, different systems cannot share user models or predict preferences in the absence of prior interactions. We use ideas from the theory of Communities of Practice to consolidate user models and to extend current approaches towards a CoPsensitive adaptation. 1 Motivation At the Jacobs University Bremen we offer a lecture on General Computer Science (GenCS) to an international student body. There we are challenged with the students' different mathematical backgrounds. The majority of our students believe that these mathematical discrepancies are very problematic, especially in the beginning of a course. Students reported that they had problems to get acquainted with the professor's notation systems; some had the feeling that the pace of the cou...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: LWA
• Authors: Christine Müller
• Keywords: Interaction Preferences, LWA 2008, Software Engineering, User Modeling Techniques, User Models