Active Learning for Technology Enhanced Learning

Abstract

Suggesting tasks and learning resources of appropriate difficulty to learners is challenging. Neither should they be too difficult and nor too easy. Well-chosen tasks would enable a quick assessment of the learner, well-chosen learning resources would speed up the learning curve most. We connect active learning to classical pedagogical theory and propose the uncertainty sampling framework as a means to the challenge of selecting optimal tasks and learning resources to learners. To assess the efficiency of this strategy, we compared different exercise selection strategies and evaluated their effect on different datasets. We consistently find that uncertainty sampling significantly outperforms several alternative exercise selection approaches and thus leads to a faster convergence to the true assessment. These findings demonstrate that active (machine) learning is consistent with classic learning theory. It is a valuable instrument for choosing appropriate exercises as well as learning resources both from a teacher’s and from a learner’s perspective.