Experimenting with a real-size man-hill to optimize pedagogical paths

ABSTRACT

This paper describes experiments aimed at adapting Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) techniques to an e-learning environment, thanks to the fact that the available on-line material can be organized in a graph by means of hyperlinks between educational topics. The structure of this graph is to be optimized in order to facilitate the learning process for students.ACO is based on an ant-hill metaphor. In this case, however, the agents that move on the graph are students who unconsciously leave pheromones in the environment depending on their success or failure. In the paper, the whole process is therefore referred to as a "man-hill."Compared to the [13, 14] papers that were providing guidelines for this problem, real-size tests have been performed, showing that man-hills behave differently from ant-hills. The notion of pheromone erosion (rather than evaporation) is introduced.

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