Hypermedia and Education : a New Approach Imanol Usandizaga, Philippe Lopisteguy, Tomas A. Perez, Julian Gutierrez Facultad de Informatica UPV/EHU Paseo Manuel de Lardizabal 20.009 - San Sebastian - Spain e-mail : jibusloi@si.ehu.es 1. Introduction Many educational systems are using hypermedia techniques, but the demand of more educative capabilities is growing rapidly. Usually, these systems only provide information to the student with a few or even null capabilities to evaluate the learning process that happened already. They also lack of an important capability to adapt to the student. This lack implies that the student, then, has to adapt his/her behaviour to the system. Due to these problems, a new generation of hypermedia systems is emerging, from the following premises: • a) An educational system has to supervise and evaluate the student learning, avoiding the loss in the covered subjects by. • b) An educational system has to adapt to the student, at any level: domain organization, interface, strategies,... Some educative hypermedia tendencies propose the addition of informationto the links, including scripts, and provide different branching optionsaccording to previous student interactions, as (Beltran,93). The amount ofwork needed to implement the adaptation in each link in the system isconsiderable. Others propose a new way to avoid staticity, as exercice repetition,using a expert system that has references to exercices able to be linked to the hyperspace. (ElHani,93) also proposes to include dinamically calculated links to make the student revisit nodes that correspond tofailed concepts. The Hyperflex system, from (Kaplan, Fenwick & Chen,93), takes into account user goals and recommends nodes to be visited. The system has asssociated a list of values to the links, one for each goal, and according to them, provides an ordered list of the advised-to-be-visited nodes. In any case, the expert has to give the goals (not necessary known by the student) and, if the goal selection is not adequate, then the hyperspace traversal may be negative. Besides, there must be somebody defining the different goals and identifying, for each node, the nodes to be visited next. MetaDoc, from (Boyle &Encarnacion,94), an on-line reference manual that changes the degree of explanation shown by the nodes according to some stereotypes of users. However, the system has no initiative, it only adapts when the user requests it explicitly and this adaptation is only based in several predecided stereotypes. 2.-HyperTutor Approach: Our approach (Perez, 95) integrates Intelligent Tutoring Systems andHypermedia. The result is HyperTutor, an Adaptive Hypermedia System for Education, organised in two easily identifiable and separable modules: the Hypermedia Component manages the