Measures for recommendations based on past students' activity

Abstract

This paper introduces two measures for the recommendation of study materials based on students' past study activity. We use records from the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and analyse the activity of previous students. We assume that the activity of past students represents patterns, which can be used as a basis for recommendations to current students. The measures we define are Relevance, for description of a supposed VLE activity derived from previous students of the course, and Effort, that represents the actual effort of individual current students. Based on these measures, we propose a composite measure, which we call Importance. We use data from the previous course presentations to evaluate of the consistency of students' behaviour. We use correlation of the defined measures Relevance and Average Effort to evaluate the behaviour of two different student cohorts and the Root Mean Square Error to measure the deviation of Average Effort and individual student Effort.