Extracting Course Features and Learner Profiling for Course Recommendation Systems: A Comprehensive Literature Review

Abstract

As education has evolved towards online learning, the availability of learning materials has expanded and consequently, learners’ behavior in choosing resources has changed. The need to offer personalized learning experiences and content has never been greater. Research has explored methods to personalize learning paths and match learning materials with learners’ profiles. Course recommendation systems have emerged as a solution to help learners select courses that suit their interests and aptitude. A comprehensive review study was required to explore the implementation of course recommender systems, with the specifics of courses and learners as the main focal points. This study provided a framework to explain and categorize data sources for course feature extraction, and described the information sources used in previous research to model learner profiles for course recommendations. This review covered articles published between 2015 and 2022 in the repositories most relevant to education and computer science. It revealed increased attention paid to combining course features from different sources. The creation of multi-dimensional learner profiles using multiple learner characteristics and implementing machine-learning-based recommenders has recently gained momentum. As well, a lack of focus on learners’ micro-behaviors and learning actions to create precise models was noted in the literature. Conclusions about recent course recommendation systems development are also discussed.