Investigating the Reuse of Course Generation Knowledge

Course generation knowledge, i.e., how to assemble a sequence of learning objects which is adapted to a learner’s goals, competencies and preferences, is hard to assess and expensive to formalize, at least if it is based on pedagogical principles. On the other hand, once a course generator has been developed, it allows generating personalized courses for individual users at a relatively low cost. Therefore, course generation lends itself of being available as a (Web) service such that other systems can access its functionality without having to implement the knowledge themselves. In this paper we investigate whether this reuse of course generation knowledge works in practice. We took a course generator that was developed in the European project LeActiveMath and made it available for use in a Chinese distant university. In the paper, we describe how we represent the generic course generation knowledge and the difficulties we faced and the results we achieved when we applied the course generator in the Chinese setting. We also report on using course generation in a bioinformatic workflow environment.