Course enrollment recommendation is a relevant task that helps university students decide what is the best combination of courses to enroll in the next term. In particular, recommender system techniques like matrix factorization and collaborative filtering have been developed to try to solve this problem. As these techniques fail to represent the time-dependent nature of academic performance datasets we propose a deep learning approach using recurrent neural networks that aims to better represent how chronological order of course grades affects the probability of success. We have shown that it is possible to obtain a performance of 81.10% on AUC metric using only grade information and that it is possible to develop a recommender system with academic student performance prediction. This is shown to be meaningful across different student GPA levels and course difficulties
In order to help undergraduate students towards successfully completing their degrees, developing tools that can assist students during the course selection process is a significant task in the education domain. The optimal set of courses for each student should include courses that help him/her graduate in a timely fashion and for which he/she is well-prepared for so as to get a good grade in. To this end, we propose two different grade-aware course recommendation approaches to recommend to each student his/her optimal set of courses. The first approach ranks the courses by using an objective…
Collaborative filtering based algorithms, including Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), tend towards predicting a perpetuation of past observed behavior. In a recommendation context, this can lead to an overly narrow set of suggestions lacking in serendipity and inadvertently placing the user in what is known as a "filter bubble." In this paper, we grapple with the issue of the filter bubble in the context of a course recommendation system in production at a public university. Most universities in the United States encourage students to explore developing interests while simultaneously advising t…
University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；Florida International University（佛罗里达国际大学）
Course selection is challenging for students in higher educational institutions. Existing course recommendation systems make relevant suggestions to the students and help them in exploring the available courses. The recommended courses can influence students' choice of degree program, future employment, and even their socioeconomic status. This paper focuses on identifying and alleviating biases that might be present in a course recommender system. We strive to promote balanced opportunities with our suggestions to all groups of students. At the same time, we need to make recommendations of go…
University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
With cross-disciplinary academic interests increasing and academic advising resources over capacity, the importance of exploring data-assisted methods to support student decision making has never been higher. We build on the findings and methodologies of a quickly developing literature around prediction and recommendation in higher education and develop a novel recurrent neural network-based recommendation system for suggesting courses to help students prepare for target courses of interest, personalized to their estimated prior knowledge background and zone of proximal development. We validat…
Yanshan University（燕山大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
Massive open online courses are becoming a modish way for education, which provides a large-scale and open-access learning opportunity for students to grasp the knowledge. To attract students' interest, the recommendation system is applied by MOOCs providers to recommend courses to students. However, as a course usually consists of a number of video lectures, with each one covering some specific knowledge concepts, directly recommending courses overlook students'interest to some specific knowledge concepts. To fill this gap, in this paper, we study the problem of knowledge concept recommendati…
University of Minnesota Twin Cities（明尼苏达大学双城分校）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
In recent years, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have witnessed immense growth in popularity. Now, due to the recent Covid19 pandemic situation, it is important to push the limits of online education. Discussion forums are primary means of interaction among learners and instructors. However, with growing class size, students face the challenge of finding useful and informative discussion forums. This problem can be solved by matching the interest of students with thread contents. The fundamental challenge is that the student interests drift as they progress through the course, and forum co…
Technology is increasingly used -- unintentionally (misinformation) or intentionally (disinformation) -- to spread false information at scale, with potentially broad-reaching societal effects. For example, technology enables increasingly realistic false images and videos, and hyper-personal targeting means different people may see different versions of reality. This report is the culmination of a PhD-level special topics course (https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse599b/18au/) in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School in the fall of 2018. …
The aggregate behaviors of users can collectively encode deep semantic information about the objects with which they interact. In this paper, we demonstrate novel ways in which the synthesis of these data can illuminate the terrain of users' environment and support them in their decision making and wayfinding. A novel application of Recurrent Neural Networks and skip-gram models, approaches popularized by their application to modeling language, are brought to bear on student university enrollment sequences to create vector representations of courses and map out traversals across them. We prese…
The concept of Capture the Flag (CTF) games for practicing cybersecurity skills is widespread in informal educational settings and leisure-time competitions. However, it is not much used in university courses. This paper summarizes our experience from using jeopardy CTF games as homework assignments in an introductory undergraduate course. Our analysis of data describing students' in-game actions and course performance revealed four aspects that should be addressed in the design of CTF tasks: scoring, scaffolding, plagiarism, and learning analytics capabilities of the used CTF platform. The pa…
SmartCourse: A Contextual AI-Powered Course Advising System for Undergraduates
Department of Computer Science, Wenzhou-Kean University, Wenzhou, China（计算机科学系，温州市凯恩大学，中国温州）；Department of Computer Science, Kean University, Union, NJ, United States（计算机科学系，凯恩大学，美国新泽西州联合市）
Social learning, i.e., students learning from each other through social interactions, has the potential to significantly scale up instruction in online education. In many cases, such as in massive open online courses (MOOCs), social learning is facilitated through discussion forums hosted by course providers. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic model for the process of learners posting on such forums, using point processes. Different from existing works, our method integrates topic modeling of the post text, timescale modeling of the decay in post activity over time, and learner topic in…
Adaptive remote instruction has led to important lessons for the future, including rediscovery of known pedagogical principles in new contexts and new insights for supporting remote learning. Studying one computer science department that serves residential and remote undergraduate and graduate students, we conducted interviews with stakeholders in the department (n=26) and ran a department-wide student survey (n=102) during the four academic quarters from spring 2020 to spring 2021. Our case study outlines what the instructors did, summarizes what instructors and students say about courses dur…
A Case-Study on Teaching Undergraduate-Level Software Engineering Course Using Inverted-Classroom, Large-Group, Real-Client and Studio-Based Instruction Model
Adaptive learning aims to stimulate and meet the needs of individual learners, which requires sophisticated system-level coordination of diverse tasks, including modeling learning resources, estimating student states, and making personalized recommendations. Existing deep learning methods have achieved great success over statistical models; however, they still lack generalization for diverse tasks and suffer from insufficient capacity since they are composed of highly-coupled task-specific architectures and rely on small-scale, coarse-grained recommendation scenarios. To realize the idea of ge…
