Konstantin Bauman and Alexander Tuzhilin

TUILES: Tuesday Informal Lunchtime Seminars Fall 2014

Tuesday, October 18th

KMC 8-170

Lunch will be available at 12:15 pm. The seminar begins at 12:30 pm.

“Recommending Learning Materials to the Students by Identifying their Knowledge Gaps”

Konstantin Bauman and Alexander Tuzhilin

In this talk we present a new content-based method of providing recommendations of educational materials to the students by identifying gaps in their knowledge of the subject matter in the online courses that they take. These recommendations have a remedial purpose of closing these “gaps” by providing relevant targeted educational materials to the students. We empirically validate our method by conducting a randomized controlled experiment on the students from an online university. We demonstrate that the students not only liked our recommendations, but that these recommendations proved to be useful to certain segments of the student body in the sense that they improved student performance on the final exams.