Pedagogically founded courseware generation based on HTN-planning

Course generation enables the automatic assembly of course (ware) adapted to the learner’s competencies and learning goals. It offers a middle-way between traditional pre-authored “one-size fits all” courseware and manual resource look-up. Such an assembly requires pedagogical knowledge, represented, for instance, as expert system rules or planning operators. In this article, we describe the course generation framework Paigos that enables the formalization and application of complex and realistic pedagogical knowledge. Compared to previous course generation approaches, it generates structured courses that are adapted to a variety of learning goals and to the learners’ competencies. We describe basic operators and methods for course generation, which are used to formalize seven different types of courses. Furthermore, we present the results of technical evaluations that investigated the performance of the proposed framework. Among others, the results show that Paigos takes less than a second to generate complex courses with an average learning time of about twelve hours. The results also show that large amounts of educational resources are required for an adaptive pedagogically founded course generation.