NEXT LEVEL: A COURSE RECOMMENDER SYSTEM BASED ON CAREER INTERESTS

Skills-based hiring is a talent management approach that empowers employers to align recruitment around business results, rather than around credentials and title. It starts with employers identifying the particular skills required for a role, and then screening and evaluating candidates’ competencies against those requirements. With the recent rise in employers adopting skills-based hiring practices, it has become integral for students to take courses that improve their marketability and support their long-term career success. A 2017 survey of over 32,000 students at 43 randomly selected institutions found that only 34% of students believe they will graduate with the skills and knowledge required to be successful in the job market. Furthermore, the study found that while 96% of chief academic officers believe that their institutions are very or somewhat effective at preparing students for the workforce, only 11% of business leaders strongly agree [11]. An implication of the misalignment is that college graduates lack the skills that companies need and value. Fortunately, the rise of skills-based hiring provides an opportunity for universities and students to establish and follow clearer classroom-to-career pathways. To this end, this paper presents a course recommender system that aims to improve students’ career readiness by suggesting relevant skills and courses based on their unique career interests

Clemson University’s Teacher Learning Progression Program: Personalized Advanced Credentials for Teachers

This chapter provides an overview of Clemson University\u27s Teacher Learning Progression program, which offers participating middle school science, technology, engineering, and/or mathematics (STEM) teachers with personalized advanced credentials. In contrast to typical professional development (PD) approaches, this program identifies individualized pathways for PD based on teachers\u27 unique interests and needs and offers PD options through the use of a “recommender system”—a system providing context-specific recommendations to guide teachers toward the identification of preferred PD pathways and content. In this chapter, the authors introduce the program and highlight (1) the data collection and instrumentation needed to make personalized PD recommendations, (2) the recommender system, and (3) the personalized advanced credential options. The authors also discuss lessons learned through initial stages of project implementation and consider future directions for the use of recommender systems to support teacher PD, considering both research and applied implications and settings

Hybrid human-AI driven open personalized education

Attaining those skills that match labor market demand is getting increasingly complicated as prerequisite knowledge, skills, and abilities are evolving dynamically through an uncontrollable and seemingly unpredictable process. Furthermore, people's interests in gaining knowledge pertaining to their personal life (e.g., hobbies and life-hacks) are also increasing dramatically in recent decades. In this situation, anticipating and addressing the learning needs are fundamental challenges to twenty-first century education. The need for such technologies has escalated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, where online education became a key player in all types of training programs. The burgeoning availability of data, not only on the demand side but also on the supply side (in the form of open/free educational resources) coupled with smart technologies, may provide a fertile ground for addressing this challenge. Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute to the literature about the utilization of (open and free-online) educational resources toward goal-driven personalized informal learning, by developing a novel Human-AI based system, called eDoer. In this thesis, we discuss all the new knowledge that was created in order to complete the system development, which includes 1) prototype development and qualitative user validation, 2) decomposing the preliminary requirements into meaningful components, 3) implementation and validation of each component, and 4) a final requirement analysis followed by combining the implemented components in order develop and validate the planned system (eDoer). All in all, our proposed system 1) derives the skill requirements for a wide range of occupations (as skills and jobs are typical goals in informal learning) through an analysis of online job vacancy announcements, 2) decomposes skills into learning topics, 3) collects a variety of open/free online educational resources that address those topics, 4) checks the quality of those resources and topic relevance using our developed intelligent prediction models, 5) helps learners to set their learning goals, 6) recommends personalized learning pathways and learning content based on individual learning goals, and 7) provides assessment services for learners to monitor their progress towards their desired learning objectives. Accordingly, we created a learning dashboard focusing on three Data Science related jobs and conducted an initial validation of eDoer through a randomized experiment. Controlling for the effects of prior knowledge as assessed by the pretest, the randomized experiment provided tentative support for the hypothesis that learners who engaged with personal eDoer recommendations attain higher scores on the posttest than those who did not. The hypothesis that learners who received personalized content in terms of format, length, level of detail, and content type, would achieve higher scores than those receiving non-personalized content was not supported as a statistically significant result

Research on Accurate Recommendation of Learning Resources based on Graph Neural Networks and Convolutional Algorithms

In response to the challenges of learning confusion and information overload in online learning, a personalized learning resource recommendation algorithm based on graph neural networks and convolution is proposed to address the cold start and data scarcity issues of existing traditional recommendation algorithms. Analyze the characteristics of the Knowledge graph of learners and curriculum resources in depth, use the graph Auto encoder to extract the auxiliary information and features in the Knowledge graph and establish the corresponding feature matrix, and use Convolutional neural network for classification and prediction. The experimental results show that this algorithm improves the performance of recommendation systems, improves learners\u27 learning efficiency, and promotes personalized development

A Fuzzy Tree Matching-Based Personalized E-Learning Recommender System

© 1993-2012 IEEE. The rapid development of e-learning systems provides learners with great opportunities to access learning activities online, and this greatly supports and enhances the learning practices. However, an issue reduces the success of application of e-learning systems; too many learning activities (such as various leaning materials, subjects, and learning resources) are emerging in an e-learning system, making it difficult for individual learners to select proper activities for their particular situations/requirements because there is no personalized service function. Recommender systems, which aim to provide personalized recommendations for products or services, can be used to solve this issue. However, e-learning systems need to be able to handle certain special requirements: 1) leaning activities and learners' profiles often present tree structures; 2) learning activities contain vague and uncertain data, such as the uncertain categories that the learning activities belong to; 3) there are pedagogical issues, such as the precedence relations between learning activities. To deal with the three requirements, this study first proposes a fuzzy tree-structured learning activity model, and a learner profile model to comprehensively describe the complex learning activities and learner profiles. In the two models, fuzzy category trees and related similarity measures are presented to infer the semantic relations between learning activities or learner requirements. Since it is impossible to have two completely same trees, in practice, a fuzzy tree matching method is carefully discussed. A fuzzy tree matching-based hybrid learning activity recommendation approach is then developed. This approach takes advantage of both the knowledge-based and collaborative filtering-based recommendation approaches, and considers both the semantic and collaborative filtering similarities between learners. Finally, an e-learning recommender system prototype is well designed and developed based on the proposed models and recommendation approach. Experiments are done to evaluate the proposed recommendation approach, and the experimental results demonstrate the good accuracy performance of the proposed approach. A comprehensive case study about learning activity recommendation further demonstrates the effectiveness of the fuzzy tree matching-based personalized e-learning recommender system in practice

A Novel Personalized Academic Knowledge Sharing System in Online Social Network

Information overload is a major problem for both readers and authors due to the rapid increase in scientific papers in recent years. Methods are proposed to help readers find right papers, but few research focuses on knowledge sharing and dissemination from authors’ perspectives. This paper proposes a personalized academic knowledge sharing system that takes advantages of author’s initiatives. In our method, we combine the user-level and document-level analysis in the same model, it works in two stages: 1) user-level analysis, which is used to profile users in three dimensions (i.e., research topic relevance, social relation and research quality); and 2) document-level analysis, which calculates the similarity between the target article and reader’s publications. The proposed method has been implemented in the ScholarMate, which is a popular academic social network. The experiment results show that the proposed method can effectively promote the academic knowledge sharing, it outperforms other baseline methods

Sistema de recomendación de programas universitarios para estudiantes de educación media basado en Deep Learning

High school students who are faced with the selection of academic programs decide based on program information available in search engines, websites, vocational counselling by advisors, or tests. However, these alternatives have limitations because they do not take into important historical and sociodemographic information, or in case of the advisors, they cannot guide all students. This work supports the decision-making of students through a Recommendation System that presents recommendations based on sociodemographic variables and historical academic data. Also, we propose and compare two methods:   a classic Collaborative Filtering model and a Deep Learning model.Los estudiantes que van a culminar la educación media y se enfrentan a la selección de programas académicos, usualmente usan buscadores web, información de programas y asesorías o pruebas vocacionales. Sin embargo, estas alternativas tienen limitaciones, porque no tienen en cuenta las características sociodemográficas del estudiante ni su desempeño académico o no pueden guiar adecuadamente a todos los estudiantes. Esta propuesta apoya la toma de decisiones de este grupo poblacional con un Sistema de Recomendación que produce recomendaciones basadas en variables sociodemográficas y datos académicos históricos de estudiantes de pregrado.  Además, se compara el desempeño de un modelo de Filtrado Colaborativo clásico y Deep Learning