Dynamic Courseware Generation on the WWW * Julita Vassileva and Ralph Deters Federal Armed Forces University Munich Institute for Technical Computer Science 85577 Neubiberg, Germany [jiv, deters]@informatik.unibw-muenchen.de Abstract We have developed a tool for the authoring of adaptive CAL courses, called “Dynamic Courseware Generator” (DCG). It generates an individual course according to the learner's goals and previous knowledge and dynamically adapts the course according to the learner's success in acquiring knowledge. The DCG runs on a WWW server. The learner receives from this server an individualized course targeted to a specified goal. Afterwards, s/he is adaptively guided by the course through a space of teaching materials on the WWW. Unlike other CAL courses on the WWW, a course produced by the DCG is interactive, it tests the learner’s knowledge and dynamically adapts to the student's progress. The authoring tool can be used also for collaborative authoring and learning. 1 Introduction With the emergence of the WWW it became possible to provide learners with unlimited access to teaching materials. Authoring became easy since to produce such mate- rials (html-files) one can already use common text-editors. However, learners in the WWW face one significant problem: they have to cope with a huge amount of materials and to navigate through links which sometimes are not relevant to their learning goals. Often they get lost in hyperspace, forget where they started and loose a focused perspective on the field. Various approaches exist for supporting the user navigation when learning from the WWW. Most of them use a secondary pedagogical structure of concepts connected with prerequisite relationships which overlays the hyper-link structure of the documents (Nykänen, 1997). For example, AST (Specht et al, 1997) uses prerequisite structure of concepts to suggest which concepts should be learned first in order to understand the teaching goal-concept. Similarly, ELM-ART (Brusilovsky et al, 1996) annotates the links from the current concept which are "ready to be learned" or "not ready to be learned" yet. These approaches provide a type of navigation support called local orientation support (Brusilovsky, 1996). * Published in British Journal of Educational Technologies (1998), 29 (1), 5-14.