Online Course Recommendation by Exploring User Interaction and Course Description

With the wide use of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and online education, the large number and variety of educational resources on the online course open platform make it difficult for users to choose, and the requirements for course recommendation algorithms and model performance are getting higher and higher. The existing course recommendation algorithms often ignore the interactive information between n learners and courses and the course descriptions, resulting in poor recommendation performance. To solve the problems above, our work proposes an online course recommendation approach via exploring user interactions and course description documents. Specifically, LightGCN model is used to represent the user-course interaction graph to derive the structural embeddings of users and courses. Moreover, BERT model is used to represent the course description documents to derive the description embeddings of courses. Based on the three embeddings, ANFM (Attention Neural Factorization Machine) model is applied to perform online course recommendation by modeling low-order and high-order feature interactions, and learning the weights of the feature interactions through the attention mechanism. Finally, solid experiments are conducted over a real-world public dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline methods under NDCG, Recall and Precision.