Empirical study towards the creation of educational user profiles for the students of an open university

This paper describes both the settings and a subset of the results of an empirical study that has been conducted among the students of the Hellenic Open University. The empirical study's aim was to provide sufficient data for the architectural design of the educational model of students in order to support their educational process. The resulting architectural design includes student models and their corresponding stereotypes in order to produce high levels of adaptivity for the resulting system's potential users. The paper mainly focuses of the first results of the experiment by categorizing users according to their age, knowledge of computers, foreign languages etc. The experiment revealed that only half of the students participating the experiment are very familiar with the usage of computers but only a very small percentage of students have poor familiarity with computers. Most of the students are categorized in the age group 31-40, which shows that also may have other obligations together with their studies. The students of the experiment have studied before in a university and almost all know the English language. As a result the users could be categorized to different groups according to their knowledge of computers, their age or previous educational level as the analysis of the data will reveal certain patterns in their educational process and communication with a learning environment of the university.