Towards web-based adaptive learning communities

Nowadays, with the improvement of communication and collaboration services, the web-based educational systems have evolved towards systems based on the so-called virtual learning communities, where students and tutors collaborate each other in order to acquire the desired learning goals. In this situation, the mere fact of setting up an environment for students and lecturers does not guarantee mutual collaboration or successful student learning. This is partly due to the fact that just one response is given to users with changing needs depending on their level of experience in the use of the resources available on the website. Thus, it is desirable to provide some adaptation to the students. Nevertheless the intensive use of the communication and collaboration services and thus the new kind of input data for adaptation has forced a change in the user models, which are used as the basis for adaptation in these systems. In this paper we will describe the basis of a user model within a web-based collaborative learning environment. We will describe some adaptation tasks developed and that are based on that user model. At the end the empirical evaluation carried out on the system will be shown.