Combining ontologies and scenarios for context-aware e-learning environments

Nowadays e-learning systems (ELSs) are used by a wide variety of students with different characteristics. Thus, adapting it to specific users, taking advantage of knowledge acquired and registered about them (the user's model, which in ELS domain is usually called student model) is an essential feature in order to improve usability and flexibility of ELSs. In fact, the use of personalization techniques aims at improving ELS usability since a personalized system automatically customizes the user interface, content, access rights, navigation, etc., considering the student model and each user may think that the system was designed specifically for him/her. This paper presents the context-aware and culture-oriented aspects of an adaptability approach designed for ELS. The main features of our approach are described and illustrated, showing how to use it to model context and culture for personalization of ELS, representing explicitly the rich context as an extension of traditional student modeling and making use of ontologies to model it.