User Modeling for Collaborative Adaptative Mobile Educational Applications: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Nowadays mobile devices promote better academic training in classrooms and in the daily lives of students. The challenges in the ecosystem of mobile applications are related to features particular student learning, so there is a shortage of investigations in this regard. The objective of this study is to understand how characteristics of users can be used to adapt the content of an educational mobile application based on models. These are used to create a profile based on the behavior of the person, and the most used methods to create them are the explicit one, manually, the implicit one, automatically and the hybrid. In this systematic review of the literature, we analyze the methods, techniques and properties that exist for the construction of user models following the methodology developed by Kitchenham and Kumar, following their structured process. The qualitative results obtained of the systematic review are a total of 2279 articles, of which, we selected 6 for their complete analysis. As results of the analysis, we identified the most relevant approaches for the construction of user models, that are divided into two categories, structural modeling and modeling of behavior, its use depends on the purpose of the application. Also, the significant characteristics to define a student in a user model are exposed.