This paper outlines attempts to enhance student learning by addressing different learning styles through course hypermedia. Students learn by a variety of different learning styles. Previously, instructors were unable to effectively address these different learning styles outside the classroom. Students were limited to paper-based course materials that presented information primarily in a sequential manner according to the author's perception of the organization of the material. While this addressed the needs of some students, others did not prepare effectively because the presentation differed significantly from the student's preferred learning style. Two approaches were developed to address this problem. The first approach was the development of hypermedia courseware. This provided a wide variety of tools which students could use to prepare for lessons. In this way students retained complete control over how they prepared for a lesson and could choose those hypermedia tools that were most conducive to their learning. An assessment of the multimedia and hypertext documents in the course revealed that the value of a particular multimedia tool to a student varied widely. Each student was traversing the course material according to his/her unique learning style. Unfortunately, the plethora of tools confused some students because they were uncomfortable making active choices of what course material would be most conducive to their learning. As a result, a second approach was adopted. An adaptive hypermedia interface was developed that provided dynamic tailoring of the presentation of course material based on the individual student's learning style. By tailoring the presentation of material to the student's learning style, the authors believe students learned more efficiently and more effectively.

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All freshmen at the United States MilitaryAcademy take an introductory programming course. We use a custom-built integrated development environment to help teach Java. During previous work, we implemented an integrated semantic and syntax error pre-processing system to help novice programmers decipher the otherwise cryptic compiler error messages in order for them to focus more on design issues than implementation issues. The syntactic errors that we checked were gathered by an informal survey of the current and former faculty members teaching the course. We noticed over the course of the year that there were discrepancies between the errors that the instructors had identified and the errors that the students were encountering. In response, we developed a real-time, automated error collection system that logged 100% of the Java errors in a central database that all users, students and faculty alike, encountered while using the integrated development environment over the course of a semester. This paper discusses the implementation and results of our system as well as the implications for novice programmers.

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