A personalized course recommendation system based on career goals

Majidi, Narges (2018) A personalized course recommendation system based on career goals. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

Recommendation systems have become very popular and are integrated into many applications that we use everyday. We are recommended music pieces, articles, books, and movies by many websites and devices in our everyday life. Education is another example of a domain where recommendation systems can help make better and wiser decisions that can affect someone's future. With the growing number of available online courses, it is difficult to choose the right courses. In this thesis, a proof-of-concept of a course recommendation system is proposed that takes the users' career goals into consideration in order to help them with choosing the right path toward their desired future job. First, data is extracted from Indeed job postings for the desired job titles showing the relations between job titles and skills. Then, a second dataset is gathered which contains a set of available online courses and the skills that they cover. The first phase of the method generates some association rules using the Apriori algorithm which is then used in the second phase that runs a Genetic Algorithm to find the best set of skills for each career goal. After finding the best set of skills for a desired career goal, we need to find the minimum number of courses that can cover all of these skills to be able to recommend them to users which is an instance of the Set Cover problem. In our method, the last phase runs another Genetic Algorithm on the course dataset in order to find the optimum set of courses. This proof-of-concept approach demonstrates that courses that are suggested to users with a specific career goal add key skills that are trending in the market to their list of qualifications.

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