Preference corrections: capturing student and instructor perceptions in educational recommendations

Abstract

Recommender systems (RS) have been applied in the area of educations to recommend formal and informal learning materials, after-school programs or online courses. In the traditional RS, the receiver of the recommendations is the only stakeholder, but other stakeholders may be involved in the environment. Take educations for example, not only the preference of the student, but also the perspective of other stakeholders (e.g., instructors, parents, publishers, etc) may be important in the process of recommendations. Multi-stakeholder recommender systems (MSRS) were recently proposed to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders in the recommender systems. We use course project recommendations as a case study, and the perspectives of both students and instructors will be considered in our work. However, students and instructors may have different perceptions on the technical difficulty of the projects. In this paper, we particularly focus on the solution of preference corrections which can be used to capture different perceptions of students and instructors in the multi-stakeholder educational recommendations.