mending an introduction content instead of the target,
a most advanced content. That is, the recommended
contents usually precede the targets. In this course,
this occurred 4 out of 6 times.
A possible reason behind that is that documents
of introductory contents in this corpus are usually
longer, having more words. They also usually intro-
duce some of the concepts that will be studied in the
next content, thus having a lot of words in common.
So it is likely that a question has words in common
with introductory content. Although the recommen-
dation of this introductory content is not misleading
to the student, it lacks the precision that is expected
from a recommendation system and may not be help-
ful enough to improve the student learning process.
This gap shows room for improvement by exploring
other methods that don’t solely rely on the frequency
of words in texts.
5 CONCLUSIONS
In this work, we proposed an approach to build a rec-
ommendation system of educational content in VLE.
The approach consists of create a corpus of docu-
ments from online courses and recommend to a stu-
dent the contents best related to the incorrectly an-
swered questions, aiming to reinforce the students
learning process. We explored two methods to find
the best document for a given question and lesson,
the Nearest Neighbor method, based in cosine simi-
larity from documents represented in a vector space
(TF-IDF or Word2Vec), and the Naive Bayes method.
We evaluated this approach in a study case using
data collected from DAL platform. Our best result
achieved a balanced accuracy of 0.89 using NN with
TF-IDF, which was considered satisfactory but still
shows room for improvement. In general, the results
showed the feasibility of implementing our frame-
work, which can directly impact the students’ learn-
ing process by improving their autonomy. A practical
consequence was the implementation of a recommen-
dation system in DAL platform with the settings that
achieved better results in these experiments.
As future work, we intend to evaluate the impact
of this application in the learning process of students
in DAL platform, collecting quantitative and qualita-
tive data of the experience and performance of the
students while taking lessons. We also want to ex-
periment with more sophisticated and state of the art
methods or different similarity metrics or text repre-
sentations to achieve better accuracy in recommenda-
tions, e.g. attention-based models as BERT (Vaswani
et al., 2017; Akkalyoncu Yilmaz et al., 2019), pre-
trained deep learning models, and transfer learning
(Do and Ng, 2005; Yan and Zhang, 2009; Deb, 2019).
Finally, we intend to validate our framework on a
larger dataset, with data with greater variation, col-
lected from courses in different areas.
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