The volume of educational resources available to students is changing rapidly. A variety of educational resources for almost every subject 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. Our project answers this need by developing and exploring a range of innovative techniques for personalized access to open corpus educational resources. Among these techniques are adaptive navigation support and adaptive visualization techniques that offer a higher level of interactivity and expressive power and take into account not just the interests, but also the users¹ 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 personalized access to a large volume of diverse open corpus resources for students of undergraduate programming courses at the University of Pittsburgh. 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 the project maximizes the educational opportunity for every student impacting several programming-related undergraduate courses at the University of Pittsburgh. Broadly disseminated through publications and project Web site, personalized information access techniques help thousands of students to harness the educational power of the Web and Digital Libraries.

Contact: Peter Brusilovsky (PI)