9 research outputs found
Rank Aggregation for Course Sequence Discovery
In this work, we adapt the rank aggregation framework for the discovery of
optimal course sequences at the university level. Each student provides a
partial ranking of the courses taken throughout his or her undergraduate
career. We compute pairwise rank comparisons between courses based on the order
students typically take them, aggregate the results over the entire student
population, and then obtain a proxy for the rank offset between pairs of
courses. We extract a global ranking of the courses via several state-of-the
art algorithms for ranking with pairwise noisy information, including
SerialRank, Rank Centrality, and the recent SyncRank based on the group
synchronization problem. We test this application of rank aggregation on 15
years of student data from the Department of Mathematics at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Furthermore, we experiment with the above
approach on different subsets of the student population conditioned on final
GPA, and highlight several differences in the obtained rankings that uncover
hidden pre-requisites in the Mathematics curriculum
Time-varying Learning and Content Analytics via Sparse Factor Analysis
We propose SPARFA-Trace, a new machine learning-based framework for
time-varying learning and content analytics for education applications. We
develop a novel message passing-based, blind, approximate Kalman filter for
sparse factor analysis (SPARFA), that jointly (i) traces learner concept
knowledge over time, (ii) analyzes learner concept knowledge state transitions
(induced by interacting with learning resources, such as textbook sections,
lecture videos, etc, or the forgetting effect), and (iii) estimates the content
organization and intrinsic difficulty of the assessment questions. These
quantities are estimated solely from binary-valued (correct/incorrect) graded
learner response data and a summary of the specific actions each learner
performs (e.g., answering a question or studying a learning resource) at each
time instance. Experimental results on two online course datasets demonstrate
that SPARFA-Trace is capable of tracing each learner's concept knowledge
evolution over time, as well as analyzing the quality and content organization
of learning resources, the question-concept associations, and the question
intrinsic difficulties. Moreover, we show that SPARFA-Trace achieves comparable
or better performance in predicting unobserved learner responses than existing
collaborative filtering and knowledge tracing approaches for personalized
education
Which Recommender System Can Best Fit Social Learning Platforms?
This study aims to develop a recommender system for social learning platforms that combine traditional learning management systems with commercial social networks like Facebook. We therefore take into account social interactions of users to make recommendations on learning resources. We propose to make use of graph-walking methods for improving performance of the well-known baseline algorithms. We evaluate the proposed graph-based approach in terms of their F1 score, which is an effective combination of precision and recall as two fundamental metrics used in recommender systems area. The results show that the graph-based approach can help to improve performance of the baseline recommenders; particularly for rather sparse educational datasets used in this study.NELLL, Open Discovery Space, LAC
Rank Aggregation for Course Sequence Discovery
This work extends the rank aggregation framework for the setting of discovering optimal course sequences at the university level, and contributes to the literature on educational applications of network analysis. Each student provides a partial ranking of the courses taken throughout her or his undergraduate career. We build a network of courses by computing pairwise rank comparisons between courses based on the order students typically take them, and aggregate the results over the entire student population, to obtain a proxy for the rank offset between pairs of courses. We extract a global ranking of the courses via several state-of-the art algorithms for ranking with pairwise noisy information, including SerialRank, Rank Centrality, and the recent SyncRank based on the group synchronization problem. We test this application of rank aggregation on 15 years of student data from the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Furthermore, we experiment with the above approach on different subsets of the student population conditioned on final GPA, and highlight several differences in the obtained rankings that uncover potential hidden pre-requisites in the Mathematics curriculum