Logically Optimal Curriculum Sequences for Adaptive Hypermedia Systems

Curriculum sequencing is an important technique used in many adaptive hypermedia systems. When following one of the possible page sequences, visiting some pages may become redundant, because its content has been covered already by another page. Using disjunctive and conjunctive prerequisites instead of partial orders to describe the many possible sequences, logical redundancy between pages can be computed on the fly without burdening the teaching model with that task [1]. Although the general case of finding all redundant pages is NP-Complete [2] and thus, intractable unless P = NP, a large subset can be located efficiently in realtime. The advantage of separating out logical redundancy, the advantage of using conjunctive and disjunctive prerequisites, and the algorithms to find redundant pages are discussed. An interesting characteristic of the presented approach is that it can be used together with a wide variety of user and teaching models.