A literature review of adaptive context-aware educational systems

What is it about?

Adaptive context-aware learning environments (ACALEs) can detect the learner’s context and adapt learning materials to match the context. The support for context-awareness and adaptation is essential in these systems so that they can make learning contextually relevant. Considering the important aspects of context-awareness, adaptation and pedagogy in the domain of ACALEs, a comprehensive literature search was first performed. After filtering the results, 53 studies that were published between 2010 and 2018 were analyzed.

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Why is it important?

Previously, several related surveys have been conducted, but they are either outdated or they do not consider the important aspects of context-awareness, adaptation and pedagogy in the domain of ACALEs. Additionally, we conducted a trend analysis on technology usage in ACALEs throughout the covered timespan, and proposed a taxonomy of context categories as well as several other taxonomies for describing various aspects of ACALEs. Finally, based on the survey results, directions for future research in the field were given. These results can be of interest to educational technology researchers and to developers of adaptive and context-aware applications.