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TopWeb-based online learning has been rooted in education and training since the 1990s in the Anglo-Saxon context (Means & Roschelle, 2010) through multimedia/hypermedia architectures, which are learner-controlled interactive technologies (Dede, 1996) mainly designed to increase the accessibility of learning experiences, to enhance high quality of instructional content, and to better handle more groups of students through distance education (Trefftz, Correa, Gonzalez, Imbeau, Restrepo, Velez & Trefftz, 1998). Multimedia/hypermedia architectures use synchronous, asynchronous online, and blended formulas, which display data in multiple formats in order to allow personal approaches to content.
The earliest cognitivist idea (Santoianni, 2010) – started up since the 1960s – to identify learner’s preferences and state of knowledge to individualize content’s fruition is developed by multimedia/hypermedia research, which focuses on individual differences and learning styles for managing knowledge webs to analyze learner’s preferred mode of communication.
Multimedia/hypermedia research deepens indeed how individual differences may influence students’ patterns in web-based instruction and how a web-based instruction program can be designed to accommodate individual differences (Chen & Paul, 2003). Web-based instruction allows students – coming from heterogeneous backgrounds in terms of preferences, skills, and needs – to have a non-linear interaction with multimedia/hypermedia, which led to different patterns of interaction and personal choices, taken by users accordingly to the cognitive paths of their knowledge structures.