# Intelligent Educational Environments: Recent Trends, Modeling, and Applications
## 4 Intelligent Educational Environments--Overview and Key Concepts
### Intelligent Educational Environments  
Intelligent educational environments are a radical advancement that drives educational innovations and transforms the organization and model from traditional to service-based [18]. The main idea of intelligent educational environments is to change the teaching-learning paradigm and provide a quality learning process and innovative educational resources to improve learners' experience [19]. Thus, it is expected that improved quality of educational services and increased student engagement and outcomes will occur [20].  
The relationship with the real world is implemented with the help of various IoT devices (e.g., sensors and actuators), which serve, on one side, to measure and control parameters of the microclimate (e.g., temperature, humidity, level of noise, light, etc.) [7; 17] and, on the other, to assess the behavior of the involved users (e.g., teacher, tutors, and students) [5; 6; 21]. Technological support is essential for multiple reasons: data are generated and exchanged at a rapid pace, secure access control must be regulated, reliable data storage must be provided, and algorithms for monitoring and control must be developed and implemented.  
Last but not least, users must be trained to work with new technologies and be willing to accept them. This represents a trend for the digitalization of services and interactions, which is part of the innovations in modern society. A digitally skilled workforce is part of the vision for Industry 4.0 and sustainable development in other economic sectors. There are also some associated risks, such as personal data leaks, the danger of unauthorized surveillance and access, and the increase in the transparency of human profile data [22].  
Technologies integrated into the intelligent educational environment lay the groundwork for providing actionable feedback during teaching-learning interactions. Such feedback allows monitoring of the student's engagement and enables teachers and tutors to personalize teaching to maximize students' performance. From a pedagogical viewpoint, there are many approaches to implementing personalization, which are usually based on knowledge models.  
Ontologies are used in many research projects in e-learning to enhance the personalization of learning. They provide a formalized structure for representing knowledge. In personalized learning, using ontology-based knowledge representation can help educational systems understand what learners already know and still need to learn. The system can recommend appropriate content, activities, or assessments by mapping learners' current knowledge and skills to concepts defined in the ontology. The research in [23] proposes an ontology model, including both learner information and learning object properties for personalized content recommendation. The learner profile also includes dynamically changed data about the learner. Dynamic data are collected by tracking the behavior of learners and by using questionnaires and test results. An ontology for the description of learning objects based on the IEEE LOM standard is proposed in [24]. A competency ontology for learning environment personalization is proposed in [25]. This ontology is aligned with other ontologies used within the web of linked open data. The main idea for using mapped ontologies, modeling different elements of learning context for dynamic personalization in e-learning (including building and recommending adaptive learning paths and defining the prerequisite relationships between concepts), and variants of its realization are also discussed in many other recent publications, including [26; 27]. Ontologies also can enable real-time feedback by identifying which concepts the student has or has not yet mastered and which concepts need more attention. This can lead to more effective and targeted interventions, such as recommending additional practice problems or providing hints specific to the student's current learning needs.