Adaptation of the ACO Heuristic for Sequencing Learning Activities

This paper describes an initiative aimed at adapting swarm intelligence techniques (in particular, Ant Colony Optimization) to an e-learning environment, thanks to the fact that the available online material can be organized in a graph by means of hyperlinks of educational topics. In this case, the agents that move on the graph are students who unconsciously leave pheromones in the environment depending on their success or failure. In the paper, the whole process is referred as man-hill, as opposed to the ant-hill metaphor of ACO. The paper presents the system and shows the experimental results obtained. The results show that the approach is a sensible option and provide several hints for future improvement of the system.