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Blanka Czeczotková et al.
number of quite different learning styles. The second reason is the fact that there are too many
students with various learning styles.
2.3 Three bases for the creation of adaptive learning supports
When designing the methodology for creating adaptive learning materials, we have based our
approach on general principles of teaching and learning and teaching methodology of distance
education textbooks.
The principles were adapted from J. A. Komenský,(Lánský, 1997) the events of instruction by Gagne
(Gagné, 1975) and the Bloom's (Schaink, 2002) taxonomy of learning objectives. As few other works
by renowned scholars werw also referred to.
J. A. Komenský (Čapková, 1992) defined a number of pedagogical principles in his work that need to
be applied so that the process of teaching is carried out successfully and efficiently. Out of these
principles, we have selected the following five that are considered to be the most important: the
principle of sense-impression, awareness, steady and systematic approach, adequacy and durability
(see Table 1: Application of the principles by J. A. Komensky when creating an adaptable textbook).
Table 1: Application of the principles by J. A. Komensky when creating an adaptable textbook
principle way of application in an adaptable textbook
senseimpression
Using multimedia components and objects
awareness Different ways of motivating, demonstrations of practical application of the learned matter
steady and
systematic
approach
Linking to the student’s prior knowledge, sequential and systematic learning
adequacy Content and extent of the curriculum according to the current levels of knowledge and
competency
durability Goals determination according to the study programme
The instruction generally consists of learning (the activity of the student) and teaching (the activity of
the teacher), and is carried out within an educational environment (in this case an electronic
environment).
Let us summarize the facts that are known to us: we know the student’s learning style (tested before
the instruction itself).(Šarmanová, 2010; Takács, 2010) The student will be tested during the course of
instruction (feedback of the presented content and its comprehension) and generally we are trying to
create a user friendly environment (for the student not to feel helpless and isolated). The learning
environment´s ability to support a democratic way of teaching is still to be resolved. The democratic
climate gives support to the independency development, self-control, planning and responsibility. All
of these features are welcome and important in an electronic environment. Changing different
teaching methods according to the student’s present mental state and his preferred learning style
comes as an option. This area of adaptive environment design will be handled by adaptive algorithms,
designed through cooperation of teams of psychologists, pedagogues and informatics.
A necessary condition for the implementation of these algorithms is to structure the study material into
small parts. They will be arranged and offered to the student based on the algorithms in concorde with
his preferred learning style.
Teaching methods consist of a sequence of elementary steps of instruction. In the process of
instruction, there is a certain order in the sense of procedure: the beginning of instruction, lecturing,
exercising, testing and ending of the process. To be able to apply this principle in the field of
adaptable teaching, we based our efforts on the distribution of the learning process according to R.
Gagné. On the basis of this principle, we have assigned to each teaching activity a subset of adaptive
support - so called layers. The following table shows the distribution (see Table 2: Gagné’s theory
applied on an adaptable study support).
For the designed methodology to be as general and as universal as possible, we have also included
the theory of Bloom's taxonomy of learning objectives. According to this theory, in adaptive learning
materials there are learning objectives defined with an emphasis on the cognitive domain of
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