Educational Adaptive Hypermedia meets Computer Assisted Assessment ⋆ Enrique Alfonseca, Rosa M. Carro, Manuel Freire, ´ Alvaro Ortigosa, Diana P´ erez, and Pilar Rodr´ ıguez Computer Science Department, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Carretera de Colmenar Viejo, km. 14,5, 28043 Madrid, Spain {Enrique.Alfonseca,Rosa.Carro,Manuel.Freire,Alvaro.Ortigosa, Diana.Perez,Pilar.Rodriguez}@ii.uam.es Abstract. In this paper we explore the many possibilities that arise when we combine adaptive web-based courses with computer-assisted assessment. We argue that this integration has several advantages, such as the feasibility of getting a better model of the student’s progress, which will be used with adaptation purposes, and the possibility of proposing and evaluating open-ended questions in the way that is judged more suitable for each student. 1 Introduction Adaptive hypermedia has been widely used for the development of adaptive Web- based courses, in which each student is individually guided during the learning process [1]. Most of these systems obtain feedback from the student from two sources: their behaviour browsing the course (e.g. pages visited, time spent in each or navigational path) and test questions (e.g. true-false, multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank questions). Some authors have expressed their concern that this limited way of assessment may not be really measuring the depth of the student learning [2]. This fact has been the motivation of the field known as Computer-Assisted Assessment (CAA) of student essays. CAA of student essays is a long-standing problem that has received the attention of the Natural Lan- guage Processing research community. There are many possible ways to approach this problem, including a study of the organization, sentence structure and con- tent of the student essay [3, E-rater], pattern-matching techniques [4, IEMS], or Latent Semantic Analysis [5, IEA]. Valenti et al. [6] describe the state-of-art of CAA systems. In order to support adaptive distance teaching and learning, we have devel- oped the Tangow system, which supports the description of adaptive web-based courses and their dynamic generation, so that their components are tailored to each student at runtime [7,8]. We have also developed, independently, a CAA ⋆ This work has been sponsored by CICYT, project number TIC2001-0685-C02-01.