Deep Learning Recommendations of E-Education Based on Clustering and Sequence

Abstract

Commercial e-learning platforms have to overcome the challenge of resource overload and find the most suitable material for educators using a recommendation system (RS) when an exponential increase occurs in the amount of available online educational resources. Therefore, we propose a novel DNN method that combines synchronous sequences and heterogeneous features to more accurately generate candidates in e-learning platforms that face an exponential increase in the number of available online educational courses and learners. Mitigating the learners’ cold-start problem was also taken into consideration during the modeling. Grouping learners in the first phase, and combining sequence and heterogeneous data as embeddings into recommendations using deep neural networks, are the main concepts of the proposed approach. Empirical results confirmed the proposed solution’s potential. In particular, the precision rates were equal to 0.626 and 0.492 in the cases of Top-1 and Top-5 courses, respectively. Learners’ cold-start errors were 0.618 and 0.697 for 25 and 50 new learners.