Particle Swarms for Competency-Based CurriculumSequencing

摘要

In e-learning initiatives content creators are usually required to arrange a set of learning resources in order to present them in a comprehensive way to the learner. Course materials are usually divided into reusable chunks called Learning Objects (LOs) and the ordered set of LOs is called sequence, so the process is called LO sequencing. In this paper an intelligent agent that performs the LO sequencing process is presented. Metadata and competencies are used to define relations between LOs so that the sequencing problem can be characterized as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) and artificial intelligent techniques can be used to solve it. A Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) agent is proposed, built, tuned and tested. Results show that the agent succeeds in solving the problem and that it handles reasonably combinatorial explosion inherent to this kind of problems.