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Ant colony optimisation for E-learning: observing the emergence of pedagogic suggestions

An attempt is made to apply ant colony optimization (ACO) heuristics to an E-learning problem: the pedagogic material of an online teaching Web site for high school students is modelled as a navigation graph where nodes are exercises or lessons and arcs are hypertext links. The arcs' valuation, representing the pedagogic structure and conditioning the Web site's presentation, is gradually modified through the release and evaporation of virtual pheromones that reflect the successes and failures of students roaming around the graph. A compromise is expected to emerge between the pedagogic structure as originally dictated by professors, the collective experience of the whole pool of students and the particularities of each individual. The purpose of this study conducted for Paraschool, the leading French E-learning company is twofold: enhancing the Web site by making its presentation intelligently dynamic and providing the pedagogical team with a refined auditing tool that could help it identify the strengths and weaknesses of its pedagogic choices.