Session-Based Course Recommendation Frameworks Using Deep Learning

Academic advising plays an important role in students' decision-making in higher education. Data-driven methods provide useful recommendations to students to help them with degree completion. Several course recommendation models have been proposed in the literature to recommend courses for the next semester. One aspect of the data that has yet to be explored is the suitability of the recommended courses taken together in a semester. Students may face more difficulty coping with the workload of courses if there is no relationship among courses taken within a semester. To address this problem, we propose to employ session-based approaches to recommend a set of courses for the next semester. In particular, we test two session-based recommendation models, CourseBEACON and CourseDREAM. Our experimental evaluation shows that session-based methods outperform existing popularity-based, sequential, and non-sequential recommendation approaches. Accurate course recommendation can lead to better student advising, which, in turn, can lead to better student performance, lower dropout rates, and better overall student experience and satisfaction. [For the complete proceedings, see ED630829.]