Personalized Education; Solving a Group Formation and Scheduling Problem for Educational Content

Wether teaching in a classroom or a Massive Online Open Course it is crucial to present the material in a way that benefits the audience as a whole. We identify two important tasks to solve towards this objective; (1.) group students so that they can maximally benefit from peer interaction and (2.) find an optimal schedule of the educational material for each group. Thus, in this paper we solve the problem of team formation and content scheduling for education. Given a time frame d, a set of students S with their required need to learn different activities T and given k as the number of desired groups, we study the problem of finding k group of students. The goal is to teach students within time frame d such that their potential for learning is maximized and find the best schedule for each group. We show this problem to be NP-hard and develop a polynomial algorithm for it. We show our algorithm to be effective both on synthetic as well as a real data set. For our experiments we use real data on students’ grades in a Computer Science department. As part of our contribution we release a semi-synthetic dataset that mimics the properties of the real data.