Peer Learning Through Targeted Dynamic Groups Formation

Abstract

Peer groups leverage the presence of knowledgeable individuals in order to increase the knowledge level of other participants. The ‘smart’ formation of peer groups can thus play a crucial role in educational settings, including online social networks and learning platforms. Indeed, the targeted groups formation problem, where the objective is to maximize a measure of aggregate knowledge, has received considerable attention in recent literature. In this paper we initiate a dynamic variant of the problem that, unlike previous works, allows the change of group composition over time while still targeting to maximize the aggregated knowledge level. The problem is studied in a principled way, using a realistic learning gain function and for two different interaction modes among the group members. On the algorithmic side, we present DyGroups, a generic algorithmic framework that is greedy in nature and highly scalable. We present non-trivial proofs to demonstrate theoretical guarantees for DyGroups in a special case. We also present real peer learning experiments with humans, and perform synthetic data experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solutions by comparing against multiple appropriately selected baseline algorithms.