With the emergence of MOOCs, it becomes crucial to automate the process of a course design to accommodate the diverse learning demands of students. Modeling the relationships among educational topics is a fundamental first step for automating curriculum planning and course design. In this paper, we introduce "Topic Transition Map" (TTM),…

Academic advising plays an important role in students' decision-making in higher education. Data-driven methods provide useful recommendations to students to help them with degree completion. Several course recommendation models have been proposed in the literature to recommend courses for the next semester. One aspect of the data that has yet to…

Course selection is a crucial and challenging problem that students have to face while navigating through an undergraduate degree program. The decisions they make shape their future in ways that they cannot conceive in advance. Available departmental sample degree plans are not personalized for each student, and personal discussion time with an…

Consistency of learning behaviors is known to play an important role in learners' engagement in a course and impact their learning outcomes. Despite significant advances in the area of learning analytics (LA) in measuring various self-regulated learning behaviors, using LA to measure consistency of online course engagement patterns remains largely…

Spaced repetition is among the most studied learning strategies in the cognitive science literature. It consists in temporally distributing exposure to an information so as to improve long-term memorization. Providing students with an adaptive and personalized distributed practice schedule would benefit more than just a generic scheduler. However,…

Open-ended learning environments (OELEs) allow students to freely interact with the content and to discover important principles and concepts of the learning domain on their own. However, only some students possess the necessary skills for efficient and effective exploration. Guidance in the form of targeted interventions or feedback therefore has…

BKT and other classical student models are designed for binary environments where actions are either correct or incorrect. These models face limitations in open-ended and data-driven environments where actions may be correct but non-ideal or where there may even be degrees of error. In this paper we present BKT-SR and RKT-SR: extensions of the…

This paper attempts to quantify the accuracy limit of "nextitem-correct" prediction by using numerical optimization to estimate the student's probability of getting each question correct given a complete sequence of item responses. This optimization is performed without an explicit parameterized model of student behavior, but with the…

Recent years have seen a growing interest in intelligent game-based learning environments featuring virtual agents. A key challenge posed by incorporating virtual agents in game-based learning environments is dynamically determining the dialogue moves they should make in order to best support students' problem solving. This paper presents a…

Instructional development models have been primarily concerned with audience analysis, content, media selection and sequencing, rather than the design of the program. They fail to analyze either the interaction between the content, learner, objectives, and medium, or how best to design the content for presentation through the medium. This paper…

Sequencing in adventure education involves putting activities in an order appropriate to the needs of the group. Contrary to the common assumption that each adventure sequence is unique, a review of literature concerning five sequencing models reveals a certain universality. These models present sequences that move through four phases: group…

This paper offers a critique of elaboration theory (ET) based on recent cognitive research and offers suggestions for updating the model to reflect new knowledge. It begins by summarizing the basic strategies of this model for sequencing and organizing courses of instruction: (1) organizing structure; (2) simple-to-complex sequence; (3) sequencing…

Eighty college students with no computer programing experience were the subjects of a study to determine the effects of the use of advanced organizers and subject control of instruction on performance. Students either received a logical or a scrambled sequence of instructional frames on computer programing, were either allowed to alter the order…

Supervisory issues as they relate to the training of family therapists have been a concern for the past two decades. Many developmental theories suggest that the trainee-supervisor relationship moves through a series of stages similar to the process of moving from childhood to adulthood. A few theorists have developed procedures whereby…

Case studies of six college freshmen enrolled in freshman composition courses that used sequenced assignments addressed to the same topic all term were used to investigate how students define revision, how their teachers define it, and what is important about the differences in these definitions. The students possessed a common theory of revision…