5 research outputs found
Team Formation for Scheduling Educational Material in Massive Online Classes
Whether teaching in a classroom or a Massive Online Open Course it is crucial
to present the material in a way that benefits the audience as a whole. We
identify two important tasks to solve towards this objective, 1 group students
so that they can maximally benefit from peer interaction and 2 find an optimal
schedule of the educational material for each group. Thus, in this paper, we
solve the problem of team formation and content scheduling for education. Given
a time frame d, a set of students S with their required need to learn different
activities T and given k as the number of desired groups, we study the problem
of finding k group of students. The goal is to teach students within time frame
d such that their potential for learning is maximized and find the best
schedule for each group. We show this problem to be NP-hard and develop a
polynomial algorithm for it. We show our algorithm to be effective both on
synthetic as well as a real data set. For our experiments, we use real data on
students' grades in a Computer Science department. As part of our contribution,
we release a semi-synthetic dataset that mimics the properties of the real
data
A Team-Formation Algorithm for Faultline Minimization
In recent years, the proliferation of online resumes and the need to evaluate
large populations of candidates for on-site and virtual teams have led to a
growing interest in automated team-formation. Given a large pool of candidates,
the general problem requires the selection of a team of experts to complete a
given task. Surprisingly, while ongoing research has studied numerous
variations with different constraints, it has overlooked a factor with a
well-documented impact on team cohesion and performance: team faultlines.
Addressing this gap is challenging, as the available measures for faultlines in
existing teams cannot be efficiently applied to faultline optimization. In this
work, we meet this challenge with a new measure that can be efficiently used
for both faultline measurement and minimization. We then use the measure to
solve the problem of automatically partitioning a large population into
low-faultline teams. By introducing faultlines to the team-formation
literature, our work creates exciting opportunities for algorithmic work on
faultline optimization, as well as on work that combines and studies the
connection of faultlines with other influential team characteristics