A Framework for Co-creation in Generic Educational Activities Using Swarming

The flipped classroom model has become increasingly popular in recent years as it supports students’ collaboration leading to co-creation of knowledge. Swarming is a nature-based collaborative solution for complex problems, wherein actors’ “collective intelligence” emerges significantly more advanced than the sum of its units. The knapsack problem attempts to select the subset of items with maximum desirability while satisfying a constraint on the selected items. Educationally, the knapsack problem may be mapped as the selection of a subset of literature from a large corpus that is most relevant to a research query, while maintaining some constraint such as time availability, content complexity, etc. In this work we propose a framework that models a generic educational task and maps it to the Knapsack problem to be solved using the Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) swarming algorithm to take advantage of the co-creational characteristics of the flipped classroom paradigm. Experimentation with alternative solutions to the Knapsack problem indicate their inappropriateness to the requirements of the proposed framework, while experimentation with ACO’s key parameters indicates ACO’s suitability to the proposed framework.