With the rapid introduction of the WWW technology in the educational field, educational applications are becoming available to an increasingly wide and heterogeneous audience. As a consequence, the diversity of needs and particularities in such large communities of learners is becoming a first-order concern. The development of flexible software, able to adapt to different kinds of users, has been a prevalent area of research for more than a decade. However endowing educational software with adaptive capabilities is a non-trivial endeavor that usually requires advanced programming skills, or mastering complex special-purpose development systems, therefore an out-of-reach task for many, if not most, teaching professionals.

ATLAS is an attempt to bring the advanced techniques for adaptive course construction recently developed in the field of computer-assisted learning within reach of instructors and domain experts who are not necessarily familiar with the complexities of software development. ATLAS is a design tool for the interactive development of adaptive web courses whose structure, selection of contents, and interface presentation, are adjusted in real-time to better suit the student characteristics and his/her behavior while interacting with  the course. ATLAS drives courseware authors to a better understanding of the different aspects of an adaptive course and the relations among them: structure, contents, presentation, and student model, by integrating the design of all these elements in a single visual environment (see Fig. 1).

ATLAS is being developed on top an existing tool, TANGOW, that is used as the underlying modeling system for representing and executing courses constructed in the ATLAS environment (see Fig. 2). ATLAS combines the expressive power of a system based on the abstract modeling of the student and his/her learning tasks, with the ease-of-use of graphic specification based on direct manipulation, relieving the designer from using textual specification languages.

There is an ATLAS prototype, implemented in Java JDK 1.2, available for download.

For instructions on installing and using ATLAS, click here.
 

Relevant Publications

J. A. Macías and P. Castells.
Interactive Design of Adaptive Courses.
Computer and Education - Towards an  Interconnected Society. M. Ortega and J Bravo (eds.), pp. 235-242.
Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2001. ISBN 0-7923-7188-7.
http://www.ii.uam.es/~castells/publications/kluwer01.pdf

Page maintained by jose.a.macias@ii.uam.es
Last updated: 03/09/2003