Computers & Education 53 (2009) 726–732

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Computers & Education

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu

Computer-supported negotiation of course content

Roland Hübscher *
Department of Information, Design and Corporate Communication, Bentley University, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA 02452, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Students learn more effectively with personally meaningful tasks. Thus, students learn more if they have
Received 23 February 2009 a say in deciding what specific topics and examples are being discussed in class. Naturally, the instructor
Received in revised form 16 April 2009 knows what topics are important to cover in a course and which ones might be optional. Finding the right
Accepted 19 April 2009
balance between students’ preferences and the instructor’s requirements is not so easy and thus may pre-
vent this kind of shared control of the classroom from being realized. This article describes how the
instructor’s and students’ interests can be used to generate a list of course topics that satisfies both par-
Keywords:
ties. However, instead of adding technology to the classroom, technology is used to improve the class-
Improving classroom teaching
Interdisciplinary projects
room experiences. Specifically, it is shown how course topics can be assigned to specific students
Teaching/learning strategies maximizing what is meaningful to the students and satisfies the course parameters as defined by the
instructor. This problem can be formulated as a variation of the linear assignment problem and solved
with a binary linear program. Results from actual and simulated courses are discussed and generaliza-
tions of the topic assignment problem presented.
Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Learning is an active process where students construct their own knowledge and relate it to their previous experiences. Such active
learning occurs especially when learners pursue self-driven learning tasks (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989; Le Cornu & Peters, 2005). Stu-
dents are often more motivated and engaged in learning if inherently interested in the topic (Blumenfeld, 1992; Petraglia, 1998). The nego-
tiation of content can also result in a potential increase in autonomy of the students (Garrison & Baynton, 1987). Unfortunately,
instructional strategies consistent with these ideas are sometimes quite difficult to implement in the classroom. Anybody who has taught
knows that covering topics that each student is really interested in is an impossible task. First, students have different interests even if they
are studying in the same field. Second, what the instructor believes the students are interested in is frequently no more than just that.
One extreme way to approach this problem is to give the students a free hand in what to learn with the result that they may learn a lot,
but not necessarily what the course was meant to teach. A more balanced approach is to let students choose among a pre-screened set of
resources (Watts, 1997). Some adaptive hypermedia systems use this approach giving students the opportunity to explore, under the
‘‘guiding hand” of the adaptive system (Brusilovsky, 1998), those topics and examples they are interested in most.
A different computational approach is presented in this article. It describes a method that combines the instructor’s requirements for
the course with the students’ preferences. When an instructor designs a course, he or she frequently needs to make choices that are not
necessary for pedagogical reasons. Should I use this or that example? Assign this or that paper to read? Have them solve this or that prob-
lem? There are multiple good examples, papers to read, and problems to solve. These situations provide a great opportunity to give the
students a choice so that they end up with a personally more meaningful learning activity. Richards and Lockhardt (1994) found that stu-
dents participated in a foreign language course more frequently when they could choose what topic to talk about. This is consistent with
Brandl (2002) who recommends that students take part in planning the content of a course so that they become active contributors instead
of ‘‘passive recipients of knowledge”. He differentiates between three types of approaches which are teacher-determined, teacher-facili-
tated and student-determined. This paper focuses on the teacher-facilitated approach.
Such collaborative classrooms are quite different from the traditional teacher-centric model. Knowledge and authority is shared among
teachers and students (Tinzmann et al., 1990). As a result, the teacher is more in the role of a mediator or guide and not the all-knowing
oracle. However, giving up this control and developing the appropriate tools can be quite challenging. In this paper, the focus is on the

* Tel.: +1 781 891 2932.

E-mail address: [email protected]

0360-1315/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2009.04.012
 R. Hübscher / Computers & Education 53 (2009) 726–732 727

latter. Also, group projects are often assigned to students with quite some flexibility about the specific topic. The goal is that students will
be more engaged learners if they choose a topic that will interest them.
If students can, within instructor-defined limits, choose the topics for the whole course, the course can be quite different each
time it is taught. This is the specific problem this paper addresses. Although it is assumed that there are more topics than stu-
dents, the same approach can also be used to assign n topics to n students in such a way that students tend to get a topic they
prefer.
As mentioned earlier, the approach presented in this paper can be applied to a variety of choices in the classroom or other situations
where it would be advantageous to have people choose some tasks over others. In fact, a student’s preferences for certain learning activities
could be replaced with a worker’s qualifications for a certain task. Nevertheless, in the rest of this paper the focus will be on assigning top-
ics to individual students. I will refer to it as the Topic Assignment Problem.
The organization of the paper is as follows. First, the problem is defined and illustrated with a real-world example. Related approaches
are discussed next. Then, it is shown how the task of selecting the course topics considering the instructor’s requirements and students’
preferences can be formulated as a variation of a linear assignment problem. Finally, the implications are discussed based on using this
approach for several semesters.

2. Choosing topics for a course

Students can often be given a choice of what topic to focus on. A trivial example is when the students have to write a paper, and the topic
is not too constrained. However, often the situation is slightly more restrictive, such as when the instructor wants to make sure that certain
themes are covered to a specified degree. For instance, the instructor may need to choose between many possible articles or examples for
certain topics for the students to study and discuss. Letting the students participate in selecting the topics results in learning tasks more
meaningful to students.
An example from my own classroom illustrates this situation. In a course on user interfaces, many issues and concepts could be dis-
cussed: interfaces for people with disabilities, interfaces for children, interfaces for learners, ambient displays, tangible interfaces, affec-
tive computing, and many more. Because there are too many themes to cover in depth in one semester, I mark only some of them (e.g.,
interfaces for people with disabilities) as required. To each such theme, I assign several sets of papers that address some topic of the
theme in some interesting way (e.g., focusing on visually impaired users browsing the World Wide Web, or on motion-impaired users
using input devices). Each student will have to focus on a topic covered by one such set of papers, summarize the ideas and lead the
discussion in class.
Instructor and students together decide which papers and thus, which topics, are being discussed in each semester. Each student ranks
all the given topics on a linear scale, starting with the one that is most interesting to this student, then the second one, and so on. The stu-
dents have access to the topics for about a week where they can find out which topic matches their interest most. This approach does some-
times result in students picking shorter papers which defeats the purpose of the approach. An alternative approach would be to ask the
students to rate all topics according to some characteristics. For instance, for middle-school students active (dynamic, fast-changing)
and cool (popular or fashionable) topics were especially interesting (Swarat, 2008).
The instructor marks those themes and topics (there can be several topics per theme) that have to be discussed no matter what the
students’ preferences are. Furthermore, to avoid all the students being assigned a topic in the same theme, the instructor can restrict
how many topics per theme may be assigned by the computational assignment procedure. Of course, the students need not worry about
all those instructor-imposed constraints. The goal then is to assign each student a set of papers that is high on his or her list of preferences.
This assignment problem can be formalized as follows. The content of the course is organized as a set of themes and each theme i has a
non-empty set ti of topics. Each of the n student ranks the m topics in a linear list starting with the most preferred topic. The instructor
defines for each topic and theme whether it is required. Further, it is assumed that there are at least as many topics as students, i.e.,
m P n. Finally, the topics, and thus the sets of papers, are assigned by the algorithm described below to each student, maximizing the stu-
dents’ preferences given the instructor’s requirements.
One can also imagine a scenario where instead of requiring that topic A is assigned but not topic B, an instructor might prefer A over B.
This can be easily accomplished within the presented framework as will be shown later. Many other extensions could be imagined. Nev-
ertheless, for now the discussion focuses on those constraints and preferences that come up naturally in the context of the real classroom.

3. Existing approaches

As shown in Section 4.1, the topic assignment problem can viewed and solved as a variation of the Linear Sum Assignment Problem
(LSAP). The LSAP has been used for people assignment problems as early as the 1950s (Votaw & Orden, 1952). Extensions of LSAP have
been developed for related but different problems (Burkard, 2002; Toroslu, 2003). In a similar vein, this paper presents an extension of LSAP
to support a collaborative classroom where instructor and students share control over the course content.
Recognizing the advantage of letting students choose the topics, the shared-control approach has been used by colleagues and myself
using an informal assignment process by hand. However, doing the assignment by hand is exceedingly cumbersome and often leads to
suboptimal assignments. The quite efficient Hungarian Algorithm to solve the LSAP (Burgeois & Lasalle, 1971) could, in principle, be done
by hand. However, its worst-case complexity is still Oðm3 Þ, where m is the number of topics (and normally larger than the number of stu-
dents). Thus, finding an optimal solution by hand is not realistic, though some people may indeed attempt to find good solutions by hand as
I used to in the past. Although finding a good (yet suboptimal) solution may not sound too bad, it has potential negative pedagogical impli-
cations. Therefore, optimal solutions are worth finding. Interestingly, the students’ informal feedback suggests that explaining to them the
general approach of finding an optimal assignment has a positive psychological effect on them in that they believe they indeed got a fair
deal when the topics are assigned. These were graduate students, some with a highly technical background, some with a liberal arts back-
ground, but all interested in user interface design. It would be interesting to see whether this attitude generalizes to a less computer-
friendly student population.
728 R. Hübscher / Computers & Education 53 (2009) 726–732

4. Linear assignment problems

In this section, the topic assignment problem described in Section 2 is formalized as an extension to the linear sum assignment problem
and then solved in the next section with a linear program.

4.1. Linear sum assignment problem

The student preferences of the topic assignment problem can be formalized as a Linear Sum Assignment Problem (LSAP) (Burkhard &
Çela, 1999). To formulate the instructor’s constraints, the LSAP needs to be extended. In its original formulation, a LSAP assigns tasks to
machines or workers. Here, we talk about assigning topics to students.
Each student i is assigned a topic /ðiÞ, i.e., / is a mapping from students to topics. The original formulation of LSAPs assumes that the
number of topics m and of students n is the same, whereas for the topic assignment problem, this condition is relaxed and n 6 m is as-
sumed. An n  m matrix a can be defined which can be viewed as the graph connecting students i and topics j assigned to them.

1 if j ¼ /ðiÞ
aij ¼ ð1Þ
0 otherwise
Next, the assignment constraints can be defined. First, we make sure each student gets exactly one topic.
X
n
aij ¼ 1 for all j ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; m ð2Þ
i¼1

The next constraint assures that each topic is picked at most once. Since in the regular LSAP m ¼ n, LSAP requires it to be equal to 1
instead of 6 1.
X
n
aij 6 1 for all i ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; n ð3Þ
j¼1

Next, a n  m cost matrix c is defined where cij is the cost of assigning topic j to student i. Given the assignment function / we want to
minimize the total cost, i.e.,
X
n
min ci/ðiÞ ð4Þ
i¼1

The cost needs to be defined so that better assignments have lower cost. An obvious way to do this is to rank all the topics for each
student and use the rank as cost. If the rank of paper j for student i is r ij , then the cost matrix c can be simply defined as cij ¼ rij for all
i ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; n and j ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; m. A variations of this cost function where worse ranks are punished more heavily than just linearly could
be defined with cij ¼ r2ij .
It is easy to see that the current formulation is a LSAP. The case where m P n can be converted to the one where m ¼ n by adding m  n
students with zero cost for being assigned any of the topics, i.e., cij ¼ 0 for i ¼ n þ 1; n þ 2; . . . ; m and j ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; m.
However, the instructor’s constraints on which topics and themes must be assigned have not yet been formulated. Let S be the set of all
required themes and T be the set of all required topics. Themes and topics can be required by the instructor independently, i.e., a required
theme may or may not have required topics, and a required topic may or may not be in a required theme. Therefore, no further require-
ments need to be imposed on S and T.
First, for each required theme k, at least one of its topics t k needs to be assigned.
X
n X
aij P 1 for all k 2 S ð5Þ
i¼1 j2t k

Second, each required topic in T needs to be assigned.

X
n
aij ¼ 1 for all j 2 T ð6Þ
i¼1

Finally, if we want to have a relatively even emphasis on the themes, we can require that no theme has more than h selected topics. I use
h ¼ 2 in my classes.
X
n X
aij 6 h for all themes k ð7Þ
i¼1 j2t k

The topic assignment problem is now defined. Eqs. (2) and (3) define the assignment constraints, Eq. (4) defines the optimization cri-
terion describing the students’ preferences, and Eqs. (5)–(7) implement the instructor’s requirements.

4.2. Linear program

An LSAP can be solved by many efficient algorithms (Martello, Pulleyblank, Toth, & de Werra, 1984). The worst-case complexity of the
best algorithm is Oðm3 Þ where m is the number of topics. However, since we have added more constraints, and we solve relatively small
problems, it is easier to formulate the problem simply as a binary linear program instead of adapting a specialized algorithm. However,
solving a binary linear program is NP-hard Karp (1972), no algorithm with polynomial complexity is known. Still, all linear programs
 R. Hübscher / Computers & Education 53 (2009) 726–732 729

reported in the results section of this paper were solved on a laptop in negligible time for classes under 30 students and up to 2.3 s for
classes up to 100 students.
A linear program describes a problem in terms of linear equations and inequalities and a linear optimization criterion. Assume we have
n real-valued variables x1 ; x2 ; . . . ; xn , each of which is constrained to be non-negative, i.e., xi P 0 for i ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; n. There are m linear equal-
ity or inequality constraints over the xi , each of the form:
aj1 x1 þ aj2 x2 þ    þ ajn xn ¼ b;
aj1 x1 þ aj2 x2 þ    þ ajn xn 6 b; or
aj1 x1 þ aj2 x2 þ    þ ajn xn P b
Given these constraints, we wish to find values for the xi that minimize (or maximize) the value of the objective function
c þ d1 x1 þ    þ dn xn
Such problems can be solved efficiently in polynomial time (Karmarkar, 1984), however, the real-valued variables xi can only occur in
linear form.
The formulation of the modified LSAP can be used without further modifications. All we need is add constraints making explicit that the
aij ’s are either 0 or 1. Adding these constraints transforms the linear program into an NP-hard binary linear program.
P
n
aij ¼ 1 for all j ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; m
i¼1
Pn
aij 6 1 for all i ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; n
j¼1
P
n P
aij P 1 for all k 2 S
i¼1 j2tk ð8Þ
P
n
aij ¼ 1 for all j 2 T
i¼1
Pn P
aij 6 h for all themes k
i¼1 j2tk

aij 2 f0; 1g for all i ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; n and j ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; m

The optimization criteria needs to be slightly rewritten using the matrix a defined by Eq. (1).
n X
X m
min aij cij ð9Þ
i¼1 j¼1

Earlier it was mentioned that instructors could also express preferences and not just constraints. For instance, topics could be given a
weight expressing the instructor’s preference for them. Let wj > 0 be the weight for topic j where a larger value implies a higher preference.
Then, the minimization criterion could be simply rewritten as
Xn X m
aij cij
min ð10Þ
i¼1 j¼1
wj

5. Results

The linear program has been used in the planning of several courses. The implementation takes as input the themes, topics, instructor’s
requirements and preferences for each student, and generates a human-readable output via a LATEX file (Mittelbach, Goossens, Braams,
Carlisle, & Rowley, 2004) displaying paper assignments and a schedule for the whole semester. The appendix of this article provides an
example implementation of the linear program.
The linear program was applied to real student preferences and instructor constraints. The data for the three classes A, B and C are
shown in Table 1. The numbers show how many students were assigned a paper ranked first, second, etc. A rank of one means that the
student was assigned his or her most preferred topic, a rank equal to two implies that the second-most preferred topic was assigned to
him or her, and so on. Approximately 89% of the student were assigned one of their two most preferred topics, and none was assigned
a topic that was below rank four. The reaction of the students to their assignment was always very positive and seems to be reinforced
by letting them know that the topic assignment is optimal.

Table 1
Results with real student preferences from three classes A, B, and C. The numbers in the columns are how many students had a topic assigned at that rank.

Rank A B C
1 14 11 15
2 2 5 5
3 2 0 1
4 0 2 1
P5 0 0 0
Total 18 18 22
730 R. Hübscher / Computers & Education 53 (2009) 726–732

The results from simulated classes show a similar picture. The classes were generated randomly with the number of students
n ¼ 15 . . . 50 and the number of themes between n=2 and 2n=3. Each theme had between two and six topics. One third of the themes were
required and the preferences of the students were random. Assigning the topics in 100 classes resulted in 65.8% of the assigned topics were
ranked first and 89.6% were either ranked first or second. No topic below rank five was assigned.
In the presented results, the students’ interests were reasonably evenly distributed. This was even more so in the case for the random
assignments. However, student preferences can be construed in such a way that even a mathematically optimal solution is not satisfactory.
Assume that each of the n students has exactly the same preferences for their top m topics. The best possible assignment results in one
topic each at ranks 1 to m leaving quite a few students unhappy.

6. Conclusions

Frequently, a good teaching method requires more effort from the instructor. Sometimes, it seem very difficult to achieve the goal no
matter the time one is willing to put into course preparation. Such a situation has been the negotiation of course content between instruc-
tor and students. This paper addresses such a situation and provides an elegant solution.
Motivated by the need for assigning students topics (or readings, examples, problems to solve, and so on) they are inherently interested
in, a method was developed solving this rather complex computational task. The solution consists of a formulation of the pedagogical
needs: students have interests stated as preferences and instructors have constraints that assure a pedagogically sound selection of topics.
The actual solution can be found with a rather simple linear program that efficiently produces good results.
Explaining to the students that their preferences will be used to assign the papers optimally given the parameters set by the instructors
has made a big difference. When I used to do it by hand, the paper assignments were suboptimal and challenged by some students. Given
that it was done by a person, it was perceived as being somewhat subjective. The reaction to the topic assignments computed with the
linear program has always been very positive, and no student has ever shown a dislike about what was assigned to them.
The tool to assign topics to students based on instructor requirements and student preferences has in practice always returned excellent
results. The requirements can be expressed in a relatively fine-grained way by listing what topics are available and which ones must be
assigned to a student. The students order the topics based on which topic they would like to get assigned. However, in the future, this
may be replaced by a more indirect approach where students are asked to evaluate the topics according to a few criteria possibly resulting
in a pedagogically improved topic assignment.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Teresa Hübscher-Younger and Thom Baguley for their detailed and constructive comments on the manuscript.

Appendix A. Implementation

An example implementation of the solution developed in this article is described in this section. The linear program is reformulated
using the GNU MathProg modeling language, which is a subset of AMPL,1 because this language is close to the mathematical formulation
used in this article. Linear programs formulated with the MathProg modeling language can be solved, for instance, with the mixed integer lin-
ear program solver lpsolve2 or the GNU Linear Programming Kit (GLPK).3
A toy example with four students and two themes with three topics each is used. Although the model below is written in MathProg, a
similar formulation can be used in general programming languages like R, Java or Python.4 The toy example is defined as follows:

Theme: Interfaces for people with disabilities

Topics: Lep04, *Hwa03, Fra00
*Theme: Ambient displays
Topics: Mat06, Pou06, Vog04
Students:
Jim [Mat06 Fra00 Hwa03 Vog04 Pou06 Lep04]
Mary [Mat06 Hwa03 Fra00 Lep04]
Jane [Fra00 Hwa03 Pou06]
John []

The starred topic and theme are required. The topics are given as references to articles in journals and conference proceedings. The pref-
erences of the students are listed in order of decreasing preference. Apparently, John has no preference, that is, he (dis)likes all the topics
the same.
The MathProg formulation consists of several parts. First, the parameters and the variable to be computed are specified. Then the opti-
mization criterion and the constraints are defined. Finally, the example-specific data are assigned to the parameters.
First, the sets of students S, topics T and themes E are specified.

1
Additional information about AMPL can be found at http://www.ampl.com.
2
Lpsolve is available from http://lpsolve.sourceforge.net/ and can be used as a standalone program or from programming languages such as R, Java or Python.
3
GLPK is available from http://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/.
4
The MathProg code described here as well as an implementation in Python can be downloaded from http:/roland.hubscher.org/software/.
 R. Hübscher / Computers & Education 53 (2009) 726–732 731

set S;
set T;
set E;

Next, the parameter for the rank r is specified.

param r {s in S, t in T};
If the value of theme[e, t] is 1, t is a topic in theme e. The binary keyword implies that the parameter’s values are either 0 or 1.
param theme{e in E, t in T}, binary;
If a topic t or theme e is required, the value of reqTopic[t] or reqTheme[e] is set to 1, respectively.

param reqTopic{t in T}, binary;

param reqTheme{e in E}, binary;

Next, the variable to be computed is defined. If a[s, t] is 1, student s is assigned topic t. This definition corresponds to Eq. (1).
var a{s in S, t in T}, binary;
The optimization criteria is to minimize the sum of the ranks of the assigned topics as described by Eq. (9).
minimize cost: sum{s in S, t in T} a[s, t] * r[s, t];

The constraints are defined next. Constraint oneTopicPerStudent requires that one topic needs to be assigned to each student. It
implements Eq. (2). The abbreviation s.t. stands for ‘subject to,’ {s in S} states that the constraint holds for all students s, and the
constraint is that the number of assigned topics for each s is 1.
s.t. oneTopicPerStudent{s in S}: sum{t in T} a[s,t] = 1;
A topic can be assigned at most once. This constraints implements Eq. (3).
s.t. topicAtMostOnce{t in T}: sum{s in S} a[s,t] <= 1;

A topic from a required theme must be assigned. This constraints implements Eq. (5).
s.t. requiredTheme{e in E}:
sum{s in S, t in T} a[s, t] * theme[e, t] >= reqTheme[e];

Required topics must be assigned. This constraints implements Eq. (6).

s.t. requiredTopic{t in T}: sum{s in S} a[s, t] >= reqTopic[t];

No more than two topics per theme should be assigned. This constraints implements Eq. (7).

s.t. noMoreThan2PerTheme{e in E}:

sum{t in T, s in S} theme[e, t] * a[s, t] <= 2;

Finally, solve the linear problem and print out the solution, i.e., the assignments computed in variable a as well as the rank r for each
assignment.

solve;
printf ‘‘nnSOLUTIONnn”;
printf{s in S, t in T}: if a[s, t] then "%s -> %snn" else " ", s, t, r[s,t];
printf "nn";

This concludes the definition of the general topic assignment problem. Next, the actual data needs to be assigned to the parameters and
the sets S (students), T (topics) and E (themes).

data;
set S := Jim Mary Jane John;
set T := Lep04 Hwa03 Fra00 Mat06 Pou06 Vog04;
set E := IntDisab Ambient;

param theme: Lep04 Hwa03 Fra00 Mat06 Pou06 Vog04 :=

IntDisab 1 1 1 0 0 0
Ambient 0 0 0 1 1 1;

param reqTopic:=
Lep04 0 Hwa03 1 Fra00 0 Mat06 0 Pou06 0 Vog04 0;

param reqTheme:=
IntDisab 0
Ambient 1;
732 R. Hübscher / Computers & Education 53 (2009) 726–732

param r: Lep04 Hwa03 Fra00 Mat06 Pou06 Vog04 :=

Jim 5 2 1 0 4 3
Mary 3 1 2 0 4 4
Jane 3 1 0 3 2 3
John 0 0 0 0 0 0;

end;

The output of this program when run with GLPK shows that Jim, Jane and John got there first choice and Mary her second. Since John did
not state a preference, any assignment results in an optimal assignment for him.

SOLUTION
Jim -> Mat06 [0]
Mary -> Hwa03 [1]
Jane -> Fra00 [0]
John -> Vog04 [0]

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