Developing Adaptive Pedagogy with the Adaptive Course Construction Toolkit (ACCT) Declan Dagger, Vincent P. Wade, Owen Conlan Knowledge and Data Engineering Group, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland {Declan.Dagger, Vincent.Wade, Owen.Conlan}@cs.tcd.ie http://kdeg.cs.tcd.ie Abstract. A pedagogical underpinning is a fundamental requirement for any learning activity or event. Many personalized eLearning systems, however, fo- cus primarily on adaptive content retrieval based on a user profile and neglect the pedagogical requirements of educational systems. This form of intelligent search and insertion is effective at assembling personalized manuals, but not necessarily suitable for creating pedagogically sound eLearning offerings. This paper introduces a methodology for developing adaptive personalized eLearn- ing experiences and the Adaptive Course Construction Toolkit (ACCT), a tool built on this methodology, for creating pedagogically-based personalized eLearning solutions. The ACCT provides an environment where the course de- veloper can define a subject matter concept space (lightweight domain ontol- ogy) and create a customized adaptive course narrative based on modeled peda- gogical strategies, the previously defined subject matter concept space and po- tential learning resource candidates. 1 Introduction Typically the approach to adaptive eLearning is to perform adaptivity of the content retrieval mechanism based on the user’s personal preferences, prior knowledge, etc. The pedagogical considerations in terms of presentation, structure and narrative in some cases is completely absent and in others very weakly applied. In such adaptive eLearning courses where pedagogy exists it is inherently embedded in the content itself making it difficult to reuse or apply different pedagogies across the same adap- tive content. This level of inflexibility leads to the development of pedagogically static and restricted courses. However, eLearning research in the past 10 years has had one constant unambigu- ous finding; that pedagogy is absolutely fundamental to the success of a course and must be considered first and foremost when developing learning experiences [1]. The adaptivity should therefore support the appropriate selection of pedagogical strat- egy(s) and then apply adaptivity to the content and activities within the scope of the selected strategy(s). With today’s courses built on Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS) it could be argued that pedagogy is less directive in ensuring the overall ex-