Hybrid recommendation approach for learning material based on sequential pattern of the accessed material and the learner’s preference tree

The explosion of the learning materials in personal learning environments has caused difficulties to locate appropriate learning materials to learners. Personalized recommendations have been used to support the activities of learners in personal learning environments and this technology can deliver suitable learning materials to learners. In order to improve the quality of recommendations, this research considers the multidimensional attributes of material, rating of learners, and the order and sequential patterns of the learner’s accessed material in a unified model. The proposed approach has two modules. In the sequential-based recommendation module, latent patterns of accessing materials are discovered and presented in two formats including the weighted association rules and the compact tree structure (called Pattern-tree). In the attribute-based module, after clustering the learners using latent patterns by K-means algorithm, the learner preference tree (LPT) is introduced to consider the multidimensional attributes of materials, rating of learners, and also order of the accessed materials. The mixed, weighted, and cascade hybrid methods are employed to generate the final combined recommendations. The experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms the previous algorithms in terms of precision, recall, and intra-list similarity measure. The main contributions are improvement of the recommendations’ quality and alleviation of the sparsity problem by combining the contextual information, including order and sequential patterns of the accessed material, rating of learners, and the multidimensional attributes of materials.