How to Apply Context-Awareness in an Adaptive e-Learning Environment to Improve Personalization Capabilities?

An e-learning environment is normally used by different types of users, with different needs, profiles and cultures, however, usually it is created and maintained without taking into account these user's features. In times when webbased system needs to provide support for an ever increasing amount of material and make it available for local-language populations across the world, the introduction of the culture concept in web-based systems (especially e-learning environments) is becoming a necessity, a challenge, and a timely and relevant issue. Indeed, in attempting to disentangle this diversity, culture has received increasing attention in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community, particularly in adaptive system field. This paper details a new approach to user modeling in e-learning, taking into account contextual aspects such as technological, educational, personal and especially cultural context to improve personalization capabilities, making use of a set of ontologies for representing explicitly this rich context as an extension of traditional student modeling, and their incorporation in a actual elearning system called AdaptWeb (an e-learning system used in some Brazilians universities nowadays).