In the era of personalized education, the provision of comprehensible explanations for learning recommendations is of great value to enhance the learner's understanding and engagement with the recommended learning content. Large language models (LLMs) and generative AI have recently opened new doors for generating human-like explanations, for and along learning recommendations. However, their precision is still far away from acceptable in a sensitive field like education. To harness the abilities of LLMs, while still ensuring a high level of precision towards the intent of the learners, this paper proposes an approach to utilize knowledge graphs (KG) as a source of factual context for LLM prompts, reducing the risk of model hallucinations, and safeguarding against wrong or imprecise information, while maintaining an application-intended learning context. We utilize the semantic relations in the knowledge graph to offer curated knowledge about learning recommendations. With domain-experts in the loop, we design the explanation as a textual template, which is filled and completed by the LLM. Domain experts were integrated in the prompt engineering phase as part of a study, to ensure that explanations include information that is relevant to the learner. We evaluate our approach quantitatively using Rouge-N and Rouge-L measures, as well as qualitatively with experts and learners. Our results show an enhanced recall and precision of the generated explanations compared to those generated solely by the GPT model, with a greatly reduced risk of generating imprecise information in the final learning explanation.

Learning personalization has proven its effectiveness in enhancing learner performance. Therefore, modern digital learning platforms have been increasingly depending on recommendation systems to offer learners personalized suggestions of learning materials. Learners can utilize those recommendations to acquire certain skills for the labor market or for their formal education. Personalization can be based on several factors, such as personal preference, social connections or learning context. In an educational environment, the learning context plays an important role in generating sound recommendations, which not only fulfill the preferences of the learner, but also correspond to the pedagogical goals of the learning process. This is because a learning context describes the actual situation of the learner at the moment of requesting a learning recommendation. It provides information about the learner’s current state of knowledge, goal orientation, motivation, needs, available time, and other factors that reflect their status and may influence how learning recommendations are perceived and utilized. Context-aware recommender systems have the potential to reflect the logic that a learning expert may follow in recommending materials to students with respect to their status and needs. During the last decade, several approaches have emerged in the literature to define the learning context and the factors that may capture it. Those approaches led to different definitions of contextualized learner-profiles. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art approaches for defining a user’s learning-context. We provide an overview of the definitions available, as well as the different factors that are considered when defining a context. Moreover, we further investigate the links between those factors and their pedagogical foundations in learning theories. We aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of contextualized learning from both pedagogical and technical points of view. By combining those two viewpoints, we aim to bridge a gap between both domains, in terms of contextualizing learning recommendations.

In modern industrial systems, collected textual data accumulates over time, offering an important source of information for enhancing present and future industrial practices. Although many AI-based solutions have been developed in the literature for a domain-specific information retrieval (IR) from this data, the explainability of these systems was rarely investigated in such domain-specific environments. In addition to considering the domain requirements within an explainable intelligent IR, transferring the explainable IR algorithm to other domains remains an open-ended challenge. This is due to the high costs, which are associated with intensive customization and required knowledge modelling, when developing new explainable solutions for each industrial domain. In this article, we present a transferable framework for generating domain-specific explanations for intelligent IR systems. The aim of our work is to provide a comprehensive approach for constructing explainable IR and recommendation algorithms, which are capable of adopting to domain requirements and are usable in multiple domains at the same time. Our method utilizes knowledge graphs (KG) for modeling the domain knowledge. The KG provides a solid foundation for developing intelligent IR solutions. Utilizing the same KG, we develop graph-based components for generating textual and visual explanations of the retrieved information, taking into account the domain requirements and supporting the transferability to other domain-specific environments, through the structured approach. The use of the KG resulted in minimum-to-zero adjustments when creating explanations for multiple intelligent IR algorithms in multiple domains. We test our method within two different use cases, a semiconductor manufacturing centered use case and a job-to-applicant matching one. Our quantitative results show a high capability of our approach to generate high-level explanations for the end users. In addition, the developed explanation components were highly adaptable to both industrial domains without sacrificing the overall accuracy of the intelligent IR algorithm. Furthermore, a qualitative user-study was conducted. We recorded a high level of acceptance from the users, who reported an enhanced overall experience with the explainable IR system.

While learning personalization offers great potential for learners, modern practices in higher education require a deeper consideration of domain models and learning contexts, to develop effective personalization algorithms. This paper introduces an innovative approach to higher education curriculum modelling that utilizes large language models (LLMs) for knowledge graph (KG) completion, with the goal of creating personalized learning-path recommendations. Our research focuses on modelling university subjects and linking their topics to corresponding domain models, enabling the integration of learning modules from different faculties and institutions in the student's learning path. Central to our approach is a collaborative process, where LLMs assist human experts in extracting high-quality, fine-grained topics from lecture materials. We develop a domain, curriculum, and user models for university modules and stakeholders. We implement this model to create the KG from two study modules: Embedded Systems and Development of Embedded Systems Using FPGA. The resulting KG structures the curriculum and links it to the domain models. We evaluate our approach through qualitative expert feedback and quantitative graph quality metrics. Domain experts validated the relevance and accuracy of the model, while the graph quality metrics measured the structural properties of our KG. Our results show that the LLM-assisted graph completion approach enhances the ability to connect related courses across disciplines to personalize the learning experience. Expert feedback also showed high acceptance of the proposed collaborative approach for concept extraction and classification.

With the increased dependence on online learning platforms and educational resource repositories, a unified representation of digital learning resources becomes essential to support a dynamic and multi-source learning experience. We introduce the EduCOR ontology, an educational, career-oriented ontology that provides a foundation for representing online learning resources for personalised learning systems. The ontology is designed to enable learning material repositories to offer learning path recommendations, which correspond to the user’s learning goals and preferences, academic and psychological parameters, and labour-market skills. We present the multiple patterns that compose the EduCOR ontology, highlighting its cross-domain applicability and integrability with other ontologies. A demonstration of the proposed ontology on the real-life learning platform eDoer is discussed as a use case. We evaluate the EduCOR ontology using both gold standard and task-based approaches. The comparison of EduCOR to three gold schemata, and its application in two use-cases, shows its coverage and adaptability to multiple OER repositories, which allows generating user-centric and labour-market oriented recommendations.Resource: https://tibonto.github.io/educor/.

Modelling learning objects (LO) within their context enables the learner to advance from a basic, remembering-level, learning objective to a higher-order one, i.e., a level with an application- and analysis objective. While hierarchical data models are commonly used in digital learning platforms, using graph-based models enables representing the context of LOs in those platforms. This leads to a foundation for personalized recommendations of learning paths. In this paper, the transformation of hierarchical data models into knowledge graph (KG) models of LOs using text mining is introduced and evaluated. We utilize custom text mining pipelines to mine semantic relations between elements of an expert-curated hierarchical model. We evaluate the KG structure and relation extraction using graph quality-control metrics and the comparison of algorithmic semantic-similarities to expert-defined ones. The results show that the relations in the KG are semantically comparable to those defined by domain experts, and that the proposed KG improves representing and linking the contexts of LOs through increasing graph communities and betweenness centrality.