The volume of educational resources available to students is rapidly increasing. In a wide variety of subject domains, educational resources are now available on the Web and in educational Digital Libraries. The abundance of resources has created the need to provide personalized access to educational resources, i.e., to help students find, organize, and use resources that match their individual goals, interests, and current knowledge. This project answers that need by developing and exploring a broad range of innovative techniques for personalized access to open corpus educational resources. Among these techniques are adaptive navigation support and adaptive visualization techniques, which offer a higher level of interactivity and expressive power and take into account not only the users' interests, but also their current knowledge and goals. To integrate the results of this research into education, we are developing a system that uses the most promising techniques to provide students in undergraduate programming courses at the University of Pittsburgh with personalized access to a large volume of diverse open corpus resources. This system serves as a major evaluation platform for the techniques being developed.
By focusing on personalized access to educational resources, the project provides short-term and long-term broader impacts. The system developed in the course of this project maximizes educational opportunities for every student in several large, programming-related undergraduate courses at the University of Pittsburgh. Widely disseminated through publications and the project's web site, our personalized information access techniques help thousands of students to harness the educational power of the Web and Digital Libraries.
