Autonomous solution for design of curriculum

Abstract

Curriculum design is a major research challenge in the rapid changing world of knowledge. The curriculum represents the expression of educational ideas in practice and it includes all the planned learning experience of a school or educational institution which is interconnected with each other. Therefore curriculum design is complex process which takes place by negotiation within committee of experts in the field. Due to the interconnectivity of its different aspects it is time consuming task to design curriculum within a complex environment. As per these reasons conventional software solutions were not able to automate the process of curriculum designing to meet dynamically changing requirements in a complex environment. However some modern approaches proposed intelligent solutions for the area of curriculum development. These solutions were limited to few areas in the curriculum and do not provide better solution within the complex environment. Therefore this system provides an autonomous solution for curriculum designing within an interconnected environment with the use of ontology and multi-agent technology. This solution mainly focuses on curriculum developers in higher education. The user can input a curriculum and upon the request curriculum agents such as credit agent, subject agent, prerequisites agent are created and agents obtain knowledge through the curriculum ontology. Agents communicate and negotiate with each other and autonomously produce the well balanced curriculum according to the given input. The system consists of two major modules for user interaction, process formulation. The User Interaction module has been designed to interact with the user and this module is mainly process with the Request Agent. Process Formulation is based on MAS module and it has several resource agents such as Credit Agent, Pre-Requisite Agent, Subject Agent and the message space. When the Request Agent sends requests through the message space, related agents are activated and attend the specific task. Curriculum ontology provides the knowledge needed to create a well balanced curriculum. The entire multi agent system is developed based on the Java Agent Development Environment. Ontology is developed using Protégé ontology editor. The system has been evaluated using curriculums in the Faculty of Information Technology, University of Moratuwa. Keywords- Multi Agent System, Ontology.