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Adaptive, Intelligent, and Personalized: Navigating the Terminological Maze Behind Educational Technology

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Abstract

Educational technology terminology is messy. The same meaning is often expressed using several terms. More confusingly, some terms are used with several meanings. This state is unfortunate, as it makes both research and development more difficult. Terminology is particularly important in the case of personalization techniques, where the nuances of meaning are often crucial. We discuss the current state of the used terminology, highlighting specific cases of potential confusion. In the near future, any significant unification of terminology does not seem feasible. A realistic and still very useful step forward is to make the terminology used in individual research papers more explicit.

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Notes

  1. For example, according to Google Scholar search statistics, student modeling is twice more common phrase than learner modeling.

  2. One example of an explicit definition is by Sottilare et al. (2016): “The domain model contains the set of skills, knowledge, and strategies/tactics of the topic being tutored. It normally contains the ideal expert knowledge and also the bugs, mal-rules, and misconceptions that students periodically exhibit.”

  3. Wikipedia page for domain model has the definition “In ontology engineering, a domain model is a formal representation of a knowledge domain with concepts, roles, datatypes, individuals, and rules, typically grounded in a description logic.”

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Ryan Baker, Michael Yudelson, Ken Koedinger, Tomáš Effenberger, Jaroslav Čechák, and Valdemar Švábenský for their comments, ideas, and suggestions.

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  1. Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Radek Pelánek

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Pelánek, R. Adaptive, Intelligent, and Personalized: Navigating the Terminological Maze Behind Educational Technology. Int J Artif Intell Educ 32, 151–173 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-021-00251-5

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