Adaptive and intelligent Web-based educational systems (AIWBES) provide an alternative to the traditional “just-put-it-on-the-Web” approach in the development of Web-based educational. AIWBES attempt to be more adaptive by building a model of the goals, preferences and knowledge of each individual student and using this model throughout the interaction with the student in order to adapt to the needs of that student. They also attempt to be more intelligent by incorporating and performing some activities traditionally executed by a human teacher - such as coaching students or diagnosing their misconceptions. Since the first pioneer AIWBES developed in 1995-1996, many interesting systems have been developed and reported. An interest to provide distance education over the Web has been a strong driving force behind these research efforts. A good help for the research community was provided by a sequence of workshops that get together researchers working on AIWBES, let them learn from each other, and advocate the ideas of this research direction via on-line workshop proceedings:

AIED 1997    http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~plb/AIED97_workshop/
ITS 1998        http://www-aml.cs.umass.edu/~stern/webits/itsworkshop/ 
ITS 2000        http://virtcampus.cl-ki.uni-osnabrueck.de/its-2000/

AH'2002        http://www.lcc.uma.es/~eva/WASWBE/

As long as the field was moving to a more mature state with a good number of developed and evaluated systems, the focus of the leading research teams has gradually moved from creating more and more new AIWBES technologies to the problems of design and authoring. It became clear that the creation of each AIWBES is an endeavor that requires considerable time and expertize even though most of the developed systems supported just one aspect of educational process. Better authoring and design support was required to bring AIWBES technology to the “real life”. Several groups started advocating and developing various authoring tools and frameworks. Special attention was devoted to component-based communication architectures that allowed to re-use adaptive and intelligent components in multiple AIWBES. To support this trend and to provide a place for AIWBES researchers to discuss these emerging issues, we decided to focus the new workshop in the series on the problem of authoring tools and reusability. 

  Peter Brusilovsky 

    University of Pittsburgh

  Ricardo Conejo 

     Universidad de Málaga 

  Eva Millán 

     Universidad de Málaga

Susan Bull                       University of Birmingham

Peter Dolog                    University of Hannover

Jon Dron                         University of Brighton

Maria Grigoriadou        University of Athens

Nicola Henze                 University of Hannover

Judy Kay                        University of Sydney

Jaakko Kurhila               University of Helsinki

Judith Masthoff               University of Aberdeen

Tanya Mitrovic                University of Canterbury

Demetrios Sampson        University of Piraeus

Amy Soller                      Institute for Defense Analyses,Virginia

The eXtensible Tutor Architecture: A New Foundation for ITS

Goss Nuzzo-Jones, Jason A. Walonoski, Neil T. Heffernan, Tom Livak                         

Design of Adaptive Feedback in a Web Educational System

Vanda Luengo, Lucile Vadcard                        

Exploiting User Models to Automate the Harvesting of Metadata for Learning Objects

Simon Goldrei, Judy Kay and Bob Kummerfeld                         

MEDEA: an Open Service-Based Learning Platform for Developing Intelligent Educational Systems for the Web

Mónica Trella, Cristina Carmona, Ricardo Conejo                        

Rule-Based Adaptive Problem Generation in Programming Tutors and its Evaluation

Amruth Kumar                        

Loosely Coupling Web-Applications

Paul Libbrecht, Enrique Machuca and Mark Spanbroek        

Personalization Services for e-Learning in the Semantic Web

Nicola Henze                       

A Web-based ITS for OO Design

Glenn Blank, Shahida Parvez, Fang Wei and Sally Moritz                        

The Assistment Builder: A Rapid Development Tool for IT

Terence E. Turner, Michael A. Macasek, Goss Nuzzo-Jones, Neil T. Heffernan