COURSR2: An Integrated Time Management System for Lifelong Learners

This article presents COURSR2, an intelligent system aiming at managing the personal time of lifelong learners in an integrated way. Lifelong learners usually try to combine learning with their professional and family duties. Taking in advance informative decisions about whether they have the necessary time resources to devote to a learning object is crucial, both for psychological and for financial reasons. COURSR2 encompasses information for all temporal aspects of a learning object. For example, a course may have lectures, with cardinality constraints over attending them, labs, mid-term exams, final exams, homework, projects and home reading. The user can also represent his non-educational activities, using the general purpose ontology of the SELFPLANNER intelligent calendar application. By subscribing to a learning object through COURSR2, the scheduling engine of SELFPLANNER's is employed to find viable plans, allowing rescheduling of existing activities. Thus, the learner is able to perform what-if analysis about whether a set of learning objects is compatible with each other, as well as with his other commitments. The latest version of COURSR2 has been deployed and evaluated using real users.