A MAS Approach to Course Offering Determination

Abstract

Course-offering determination (COD) for educational programs is the complex task of deciding what subset of courses an academic department or program should offer in a given academic term or semester. In this paper, we first model COD decision settings, e.g. modeling students as a group of selfinterested agents, and then use a group decision-making protocol voting theory to aggregate the preferences of the different participants toward a single joint decision. Finally, we show how agent-to-agent negotiation techniques can be used to offer courses to mutual benefit between the department and the body of the students.