Adaptive e-learning environment based on learning styles and its impact on development students' engagement

Abstract Adaptive e-learning is viewed as stimulation to support learning and improve student engagement, so designing appropriate adaptive e-learning environments contributes to personalizing instruction to reinforce learning outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to design an adaptive e-learning environment based on students' learning styles and study the impact of the adaptive e-learning environment on students’ engagement. This research attempts as well to outline and compare the proposed adaptive e-learning environment with a conventional e-learning approach. The paper is based on mixed research methods that were used to study the impact as follows: Development method is used in designing the adaptive e-learning environment, a quasi-experimental research design for conducting the research experiment. The student engagement scale is used to measure the following affective and behavioral factors of engagement (skills, participation/interaction, performance, emotional). The results revealed that the experimental group is statistically significantly higher than those in the control group. These experimental results imply the potential of an adaptive e-learning environment to engage students towards learning. Several practical recommendations forward from this paper: how to design a base for adaptive e-learning based on the learning styles and their implementation; how to increase the impact of adaptive e-learning in education; how to raise cost efficiency of education. The proposed adaptive e-learning approach and the results can help e-learning institutes in designing and developing more customized and adaptive e-learning environments to reinforce student engagement.