ITMS: Individualized Teaching Material System: Adaptive Integration of Web Pages Distributed in Some Servers.

The authors developed a Web-based Adaptive Educational System (Web-based AES) named ITMS (Individualized Teaching Material System). ITMS adaptively integrates knowledge on the distributed Web pages and generates individualized teaching material that has various contents. ITMS also presumes the learners' knowledge levels from the states of their knowledge reference instead of from tests or questionnaires. This paper describes the framework of adaptive knowledge integration and the method of presumption, and provides an overview of the ITMS system architecture. The current ITMS has two apparent problems to be solved. One is to prune knowledge that is unnecessary for the learners. The other is to manage the knowledge distributed in many servers. The authors are conducting experiments to evaluate ITMS and planning improvement on the basis of this evaluation. The framework is currently being applied to exploratory learning in the vast Web space. (Contains 10 references.) (AEF)