Adaptive hypermedia system in times of COVID-19: Application in Management Accounting course 1 at the University of Havana.

Abstract

New trends in higher education, accentuated by the global COVID19 pandemic, visualize the need for more flexible virtual courses. The Faculty of Accounting and Finance of the University of Havana, analyzes new technological configurations that facilitate the personalization of the educational process. In this context, this work aims to design an adaptive hypermedia system prototype applied to the Management Accounting 1 course at the University of Havana to guarantee the delivery, distribution, and variety of learning content to students in a personalized way. An empirical research supported by an experimental method is presented, with a sample of 94 students, a Control Group made up of 41 students and an Experimental Group made up of 53 students; Descriptive statistics and the Pareto principle support the results. It is concluded that, 1. The personalization of the educational process through the application of adaptive techniques leads to academic success at an individual and group level, in this sense, the Experimental group only needed a final exam session compared to the three calls of the group of control; 2. Need to continue investigating new adaptation criteria, in this sense, the mean scores obtained by the Experimental group did not have a significant increase in relation to that of the Control group. This work also contributes to visualizing educational equity referring to the capacity of the educational system to offer special supports that guarantee that educational objectives are achieved in a broader dimension; innovation is related to technologies and new strategies to optimize online educational processes.