Multi-task Information Enhancement Recommendation model for educational Self-Directed Learning System

In Self-Directed Learning Systems (SDLS), suggesting specific exercises to students after viewing educational videos is crucial, which promotes the integration of learning resources and improves learning efficiency. Given that exercises and educational videos are distinct learning resources, suggesting exercises centered on educational videos containing knowledge concepts is referred to as cross-type recommendations. Traditional cross-type recommendation methods usually separate data representation and recommendation tasks, which hampers effective knowledge transfer and information fusion. Furthermore, educational resources frequently feature an irregular distribution of information, posing a significant challenge to existing models in extracting crucial information. Besides, due to the inadequate data, the cross-type recommendation system needs help in developing a robust model. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-task Information Enhancement Recommendation (MIER) Model in this paper. This model provides a comprehensive recommendation capability by integrating resource representation and merging recommendations. Multi-task learning improves the capacity to integrate information and transfer knowledge. Then, we propose an Information Enhancement Encoder (IEE) module that utilizes the attention mechanism to enhance the model’s ability to extract essential information from educational videos and exercises. Finally, to address the problem of inadequate data, we design a fusion structure that incorporates the concept knowledge graph as expert information into the model. To evaluate the effectiveness of the MIER, we compare it with other models on both predicting concepts and recommending exercises task. The corresponding results demonstrate that the MIER outperforms all the other models. We comprehensively evaluated the MIER model’s performance across a range of datasets varying in labeled data quantity. The findings demonstrate that the model consistently achieves outstanding performance and exhibits robustness, even under conditions of limited label availability. •End-to-end cross-type exercise recommendations based on educational videos.•The model can extract essential information from the resource representation.•Integrating information from domain experts is crucial.•Our model achieves more precise and robust results on performance prediction.