The purpose of this section is to bring to the readers the knowledge required in the fields of Learner modeling. We will come back to in this section on definitions and terminology of each of the main key words in our chapter.
Concepts and Definition
The learner modeling is the modeling of all the important features that affect the learner (knowledge, preferences, goals, etc.). It comes to identify relevant information, to structure, to initialize them, update them and exploit them. By replacing the word “learning” with the term “user” this definition is also applicable to the model of the user. In the case of an application other than the learner's educational model is called the user model.
A learner model allows keeping the learner information, for example his level of knowledge on a given topic (performance), his frequent mistakes/misunderstandings, psychological characteristics, etc.
A learner model can be defined as a set of structured information about the learning process, and this structure contains values on the characteristics of the learner. It provides the necessary data to the other modules to achieve the adaptation of teaching to the learner (Zaitseva et al., 2005)
Many studies emphasize the uncertainty of the information contained in the student model and the importance of the intention behind the creation of this model. Thus, a student model represents the belief system about learners' beliefs (the system's beliefs about the learner's beliefs) accumulated during the diagnostic process (Beck et al., 1996)
The learner model can be an integral part of Hypermedia Systems Aadaptatif as it can be shared with multiple systems. In this last case we talk about user modeling servers. This type of server is used in environments or more distributed adaptive systems access this server to query or update user information. Cumulate is one of the most known and used systems for user modeling servers (Brusilovsky et al., 2007)