Using Course Constraints in Simulating Student Populations

Distance learning universities usually afford their students the flexibility to advance their studies at their own pace. This can lead to a considerable fluctuation of student populations within a programme’s courses. The evolution of the student population may be an important factor in determining the academic viability of a programme as well as the resources that have to be budgeted and administered. Providing a method that estimates this population could be of substantial help to university management and academic personnel. We describe how course precedence constraints expressed in the Prolog language are used to calculate alternative tuition paths and we then use discrete Markov simulation with the Extend system to estimate future populations. In doing so, we identify key issues of the potential deployment of such a system at a large scale.