Students as Customers: Participatory Design for Adaptive Web 3.0

The World Wide Web is changing, from the early Web 1.0 to the Social Web 2.0 and beyond to Web 3.0 interfaces, but more importantly, the users of the Web are also changing, and their numbers are increasing rapidly in line with this evolution. In e-Learning, it is essential to be able to keep up with these trends and provide personalized social interaction. Here, our main customers are our students, but these customers do not come unprepared: they already have a great deal of Web experience, especially in the areas of Social Networking Sites (SNS) and online interaction. Thus, it is essential to improve approaches used in the past, where learners were only involved in the receiving part of the delivery process. This chapter therefore proposes and explores applying participatory design methodologies in the early stages of the social adaptive educational hypermedia system design process, showing also its benefits for further design, implementation, and usage.