With the globalisation in education, bridging cultural differences by making course material more accessible and adaptable to individual user needs becomes an important goal. In this paper we attack this goal for the field of mathematics where knowledge is abstract, highly structured, and extraordinarily interlinked. Modern representation formats like our OMDoc format allow us to capture, model, relate, and represent mathematical learning objects and thus make them context-aware and machine-adaptable to the respective learning contexts.

In the last two decades, the World Wide Web has become the universal information source. Search engines can efficiently serve daily information needs due to the enormous redundancy of relevant resources on the web. For educational and scientific information needs, the web functions much less efficiently: Scientific publishing is built on a culture of unique reference publications, and moreover documents abound with specialized structures such as technical nomenclature, notational conventions, references, tables, or graphs.

With the globalization in education, bridging cultural differences by making course material more accessible and adaptable to individual user needs becomes an important goal. In this paper we attack this goal for the field of mathematics where knowledge is abstract, highly structured, and extraordinary interlinked. Modern representation formats like our OMDOC format allow us to capture, model, relate, and represent mathematical learning objects and thus make them context-aware and machine-adaptable to the respective learning contexts.

Almost all aspects of scientific research and communication are now supported by software systems. Even though most of these systems
allow the user to specify interaction preferences or even employ user modeling techniques, every system is an island with this respect. In

At the Jacobs University Bremen we offer a lecture on General Computer Science to an international student body. We are challenged with the students' different mathematical backgrounds. The majority of our students believe that these mathematical discrepancies are very problematic, especially in the beginning of a course. Students reported that they had problems to get acquainted with the professor's notation systems; some had the feeling that the pace of the course was inappropriate, while others did not face any problems.

In the last two decades, the World Wide Web has become the universal, and for many users main information source. Search engines can efficiently serve daily life information needs due to the enormous redundancy of relevant resources on the web. For educational and even more so for scientificc information needs, the web functions much less efficiently: Scientificc publishing is built on a culture of unique reference publications, and moreover abounds with specialized structures, such as technical nomenclature, notational conventions, references, tables, or graphs.

At the Jacobs University Bremen we offer a lecture on General Computer Science to an international student body. We are challenged with the students' different mathematical backgrounds. The majority of our students believe that these mathematical discrepancies are very problematic, especially in the beginning of a course. Students reported that they had problems to get acquainted with the professor's notation systems; some had the feeling that the pace of the course was inappropriate, while others did not face any problems.