Automatic Recommendation of Forum Threads and Reinforcement Activities in a Data Structure and Programming Course

Abstract

Online learning is quickly becoming a popular choice instead of traditional education. One of its key advantages lies in the flexibility it offers, allowing individuals to tailor their learning experiences to their unique schedules and commitments. Moreover, online learning enhances accessibility to education, breaking down geographical and economical boundaries. In this study, we propose the use of advanced natural language processing techniques to design and implement a recommender that supports e-learning students by tailoring materials and reinforcement activities to students’ needs. When a student posts a query in the course forum, our recommender system provides links to other discussion threads where related questions have been raised and additional activities to reinforce the study of topics that have been challenging. We have developed a content-based recommender that utilizes an algorithm capable of extracting key phrases, terms, and embeddings that describe the concepts in the student query and those present in other conversations and reinforcement activities with high precision. The recommender considers the similarity of the concepts extracted from the query and those covered in the course discussion forum and the exercise database to recommend the most relevant content for the student. Our results indicate that we can recommend both posts and activities with high precision (above 80%) using key phrases to represent the textual content. The primary contributions of this research are three. Firstly, it centers on a remarkably specialized and novel domain; secondly, it introduces an effective recommendation approach exclusively guided by the student’s query. Thirdly, the recommendations not only provide answers to immediate questions, but also encourage further learning through the recommendation of supplementary activities.