Title
Reinforcement Learning for the Adaptive Scheduling of Educational Activities
Abstract
Adaptive instruction for online education can increase learning gains and decrease the work required of learners, instructors, and course designers. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising tool for developing instructional policies, as RL models can learn complex relationships between course activities, learner actions, and educational outcomes. This paper demonstrates the first RL model to schedule educational activities in real time for a large online course through active learning. Our model learns to assign a sequence of course activities while maximizing learning gains and minimizing the number of items assigned. Using a controlled experiment with over 1,000 learners, we investigate how this scheduling policy affects learning gains, dropout rates, and qualitative learner feedback. We show that our model produces better learning gains using fewer educational activities than a linear assignment condition, and produces similar learning gains to a self-directed condition using fewer educational activities and with lower dropout rates.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3313831.3376518
CHI '20: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Honolulu HI USA April, 2020
DocType
ISBN
Citations 
Conference
978-1-4503-6708-0
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
16
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jonathan Bassen1603.20
Bharathan Balaji211.04
Michael Schaarschmidt383.52
candace thille433.43
Jay Painter500.34
Dawn Zimmaro612.71
Alex Games700.34
Ethan Fast81408.45
John C. Mitchell96238662.57