Advanced learning technologies keep transforming what people learn, how they learn it and the ways they access learning opportunities in formal and informal contexts. As the educational landscape evolves, learning gets more structured around flexible curricula that have to accommodate needs of diverse student audiences, and educational organizations which offer services for accessing courses, content, and resources through a variety of platforms, devices, and learning contexts. In this framework, adapting the educational experience to learners’ preferences and needs becomes critical, in order to deliver an effective education through technology-enhanced learning processes. The challenge concerns providing an alternative to the “one-size-fits-all” approach, taking into consideration individual differences among learners and the application of emerging technologies to enhance the provision of personalized learning. The aim is to maximize learner satisfaction, learning retention and efficiency of the learning process. Adaptation can take place both at individual level and group/community level whereby intelligent and adaptive technologies are integrated to empower socially-grounded online learning.

APTeL@ICALT2017 explores different dimensions of adaptation and personalization, including learner modeling, adaptation mechanisms and techniques, design and implementation challenges, and experimental validations. A main issue addressed in this forum is the impact of adaptive and personalised learning environments in real educational (formal or informal) contexts, and how these environments can be integrated in the educational process in order to enhance and promote learning cycles. “What can we adapt to?”, “What can be adapted?”, “How can we collect and process relevant data?”, “What is the impact of adaptation?”, “How technology-enhanced adaptive environments may promote personalized learning in real contexts?”, “How are learners profiled and how do they perceive personalization?”, “How can you support users develop personalized content and courses?”, “How can interaction data collection, analysis and/or visualization be adapted to user needs?” are some important questions that need to be addressed.