As the World-Wide-Web (WWW) becomes an important educational medium, it is essential that web-based educational applications should be more adaptive and intelligent. The areas of researches in this field Even though much has been achieved from these endeavors and the promise of future successes is high, this work, in general, does not fully address individual learning differences. It warrants further studies on producing web-based learning environments that dynamically adapt the subject matter (knowledge) to the learner.

Our long-term research goal is to produce web-based learning environments that dynamically adapt the subject matter to the learner. An achievement of this goal will allow any desired knowledge fields to be accessible asynchronously to any learners or communities. As the first step toward the goal, we developed an adaptive web-based learning system, called the Distributed Adaptive Learning System (DALS) at UMKC (www.cstp.umkc.edu/~yugi/dals.html).

Our specific CREW project goal is to build a collaborative and interactive group-based learning component for the DAL system. The component will provide an interactive interface to support (1) group-based communication, (2) group-based project development and assessment, and (3) scheduling and planning for group activities. The target tools can be teleconferencing, group chatting, instant messaging, forum/message board, scheduling, project development and assessment tools, etc. Second, we will perform a set of experiments for the enhanced DALS with both live and online classes at UMKC. Through this enhancement and experiments, we can take a step toward to an efficient and flexible web-based learning environment.