A new technique for education process optimization via the dual control approach

In this paper, examples arising from a problem in education process control are considered. The provision of the number of information items in a specified discipline for education to optimize a suitable performance index is treated as a "dual control" process. According to the theory of dual control, the control signal has two purposes which might be in conflict with each other: 1) to help learn about any unknown parameters and/or state of the system (estimation); 2) to contro1. In view of this, one can see that the open-loop feedback control is, from the estimation point of view, passive, since it does not take into account that learning is possible in the future. In contrast to this, a dual control is active, not only for the control purpose but also for the estimation purpose because the performance depends also on the "quality" of the estimates. Therefore, the dua1 control can be called actively adaptive since it regulates the speed and amount of learning as required by the performance index. To determine the sequence of optimal decisions, dynamic programming is used. It will be noted that the optimal policy can be compared with the non-optimal policy of optimizing stage by stage. To illustrate a new technique for education process optimization via the dual control approach, numerical examples are given.