COURSR: Scheduling Composite Educational Objects

Abstract

This paper presents COURSR, an online deployed system aiming at helping trainees (students, lifelong learners, etc) to decide whether they are able to attend an educational object (e.g., a university class, an online series of lectures, etc), taking into account their other commitments. COURSR encompasses a detailed description of every aspect of the educational object that demands effort, commitments or simply time from the trainee. For example, a course may have lectures, with constraints on their attendance or not, labs, mid-term exams, final exams, homework, projects and, of course, home reading. All this information is represented using a suitable ontology that has been developed in order to allow easy information exchange with other systems. Taking into account all this information, COURSR is able to analyze whether it is possible for the trainee to schedule a new course or a set of courses within his calendar or not. This is achieved using an existing powerful personal activities scheduling system, named SELFPLANNER. Taking informative decisions is important for the trainee, both for financial and for psychological reasons.