RUTICO: Recommending Successful Learning Paths Under Time Constraints

ABSTRACT

Nowadays using E-learning platforms such as Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) that support users to learn subjects are quite common. Despite the availability and the advantages of these systems, they ignore the learners' time limitation for learning a subject. In this paper we propose RUTICO, that recommends successful learning paths with respect to a learner's knowledge background and under a time constraint. RUTICO, which is an example of Long Term goal Recommender Systems (LTRS), after locating a learner in the course graph, it utilizes a Depth-first search (DFS) algorithm to find all possible paths for a learner given a time restriction. RUTICO also estimates learning time and score for the paths and finally, it recommends a path with the maximum score that satisfies the learner time restriction. In order to evaluate the ability of RUTICO in estimating time and score for paths, we used the Mean Absolute Error and Error. Our results show that we are able to generate a learning path that maximizes a learner's score under a time restriction.

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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Education

    • E-learning

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval

    • Retrieval tasks and goals

      • Recommender systems

    • Users and interactive retrieval

      • Personalization

  • Information systems applications

    • Data mining

      • Collaborative filtering

  • World Wide Web

    • Web searching and information discovery

      • Personalization

• Mathematics of computing

  • Discrete mathematics

    • Graph theory

      • Graph algorithms