Abstract
In recent years, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have gained popularity with learners and providers, and thus MOOC providers have started to further enhance the use of MOOCs through recommender systems. This paper is a systematic literature review on the use of recommender systems for MOOCs, examining works published between January 1, 2012 and July 12, 2019 and, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first of its kind. We used Google Scholar, five academic databases (IEEE, ACM, Springer, ScienceDirect, and ERIC) and a reference chaining technique for this research. Through quantitative analysis, we identified the types and trends of research carried out in this field. The research falls into three major categories: (a) the need for recommender systems, (b) proposed recommender systems, and (c) implemented recommender systems. From the literature, we found that research has been conducted in seven areas of MOOCs: courses, threads, peers, learning elements, MOOC provider/teacher recommender, student performance recommender, and others. To date, the research has mostly focused on the implementation of recommender systems, particularly course recommender systems. Areas for future research and implementation include design of practical and scalable online recommender systems, design of a recommender system for MOOC provider and teacher, and usefulness of recommender systems.
Highlights
Access to higher education can be restrictive and expensive but it can be improved by implementing enhanced and novel methods and solutions
After a detailed analysis of each of these papers, we considered only 89 to be related to the topic of recommender systems in Massive open online courses (MOOCs)
The use of recommender systems in MOOCs presents exciting opportunities to increase the popularity of MOOCs and improve the learners’ experience
Summary
Access to higher education can be restrictive and expensive but it can be improved by implementing enhanced and novel methods and solutions. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a potential solution that have been used for more than a decade. The term MOOC was first introduced in 2008 when the course Connectivism and Connective Knowledge was offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes (Downes, 2008). Siemens designed this course according to the principles of connectivism, and due to the vast number of participants, it was named a massive open online course (Adham & Lundqvist, 2015). Learning objectives and plans were defined, and it followed a traditional teaching style (Sunar, Abdullah, White, & Davis, 2016) This is known as a content-based MOOC (xMOOC). Most MOOCs are not designed on the principles of connectivism, but instead are xMOOCs
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