ADAPTATION OF TEACHING PROCESS BASED ON A STUDENTS INDIVIDUAL LEARNING NEEDS

Development of current society requires integration of information technology to every sector, including education. The idea of adaptive teaching in e-learning environment is based on paying attention and giving support to various learning styles. More effective, user friendly thus better quality education can be achieved through such an environment. Learning can be influenced by many factors. In the paper we deal with such factors as student’s personality and qualities – particularly learning style and motivation. In addition we want to prepare study materials and study environment which respects students’ differences. Adaptive e-learning means an automated way of teaching which adapts to different qualities of students which are characteristic for their learning styles. In the last few years we can see a gradual individualization of study not only in distance forms of study but also with full-time study students. Instructional supports, namely those of e-learning, should take this trend into account and adapt the educational processes to individual students’ qualities. The present learning management systems (LMS) offers this possibility only to a very limited extent. This paper deals with a design of intelligent virtual tutor behavior, which would adapt its learning ability to both static and dynamically changing student’s qualities. Virtual tutor, in order to manage all that, has to have a sufficiently rich supply of different styles and forms of teaching, with enough information about styles of learning, kinds of memory and other student’s qualities. This paper describes a draft adaptive education model and the results of the first part of the solution – definition of learning styles, pilot testing on students and an outline of further research.